The impossible journey


We pushed pretty hard but Richard Jenkins would not put pen to paper until Saildrone SD2020 was safely back in the same New Zealand port she left 196 days and a successful lap of Antarctica earlier. A few days later another Saildrone, SD1021, arrived in Lymington after a trouble-free crossing from Bermuda. Satellites and weather buoys are so last year 38 SEAHORSE


In 1522 a ship called Victoria, one of three ships from Magellan’s famous voyage, became the first manned object to circum- navigate the globe. In 2012, approaching 500 years since that historic accomplish- ment, I wondered if it was now possible to navigate an unmanned object, a robot, around the planet? It was this thought that led me to design and make the first Saildrone, an unmanned, wind-powered surface vehicle capable of very long-duration missions. However, shortly after launching the


first Saildrone and achieving proof of concept with a trip from San Francisco to Hawaii in 2013, it was pointed out to me that there were far more valuable uses for this technology than breaking records. Our


weather and climate are being driven by our oceans, and we desperately need more measurement to better understand the complex processes that place. Adding sensors to the Saildrone and sending that data back via satellite could potentially take the place of expensive weather buoys, and possibly even large research vessels. It is no exaggeration to say that,


deployed at scale, low-cost autonomous ocean measurement has the potential to rev- olutionise our understanding of the planet. We set about growing the company and


evolving the technology, but I never forgot the idea that started it all. In 2015, as a small San Francisco start-up with eight people and five Saildrones, we launched


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