Marine

West’s Travel to the East

August 30, 2016 by Marine Scotland Communications No Comments | Category Collaborations, Marine Directorate Science, Marine News from other Organisations

Receiving emails from Jim Manning, a USA-based collaborator, is always exciting.  In general, these emails notify us of the wonderful travels of various satellite-tracked objects (e.g. ocean drifters, small unmanned sail ships).  Back in April 2015, we received such an email to tell us about a small, 5 foot long, unmanned sail boat, called Crimson Wave.  At the time, the boat ended up making land fall on Papa Westray.  These small, satellite tracked sail boats are part of the Educational Passages programme, which aims to provide a hands-on learning experience for school students, and excite them about meteorological and oceanographic phenomena.

Today, I received another email from Jim.  This time a small sail boat from a middle school in Maine had entered Scottish waters.  This boat, named West, already had quite a few miles under its belt, though, making it an even more exhilarating journey.  You can read West’s full story on the Educational Passage website, but here’s a short outline:

West was built by Westbrook Middle School (Maine, USA) in the autumn 2013, and launched off Georges Bank by a lobster fisherman in December 2013.  West then travelled across the sub-tropical North Atlantic, and landed on the rocky shores of Portugal in November 2014.  At that stage, West was in need of some tender loving care to allow it to continue its journey.  After some refurbishment work, and a short journey to the entrance of the Mediterranean Sea, West was released again in January 2016 by a vessel in transit to the Madeira Islands.  West continued travelling back towards the shores of its home country, before travelling from the subtropical into the subpolar gyre.  Now, West’s travels have brought it to Scottish waters, and it is sailing along the Slope Current (the flow following the edge of the continental shelf to the west of the UK).

If you want to know where West is currently at, then you can see its position on the NOAA website.

Finally, if you come across West out at sea, please get in touch with us, or the Educational Passages programme.  They are keen to keep West at sea, and healthy, so West may need another trip to shore for some more TLC.

Bee Berx, Physical Oceanographer, Marine Scotland Science

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