Above: following a trouble-free jaunt across the North Atlantic Saildrone SD1021 sits quietly among her manned cousins at Berthon Marina in Lymington. A few days later she was towed down river and dispatched back to America. Above left: four years ago and after four months at sea contact was lost with SD127 when she was badly damaged by huge seas rounding Cape Horn; the team presumed she had been lost but she then turned up largely intact three years later on a remote island south of New Zealand. Left: a 2018 trip into the Southern Ocean was cut short with tail damage to the rig during a big storm, the craft returning to Hobart for repair; the violence of the impacts sustained can be seen in a chart of vertical and lateral velocities (below). The world’s growing Saildrone fleet can all be remotely controlled via smartphone


Shortly after the recovery in Bluff I got a


call from a university in New Zealand, who said they had found a piece of a Sail- drone on the remote Enderby Island, 200 miles south of New Zealand. Assuming it was part of the wing, I asked them if they could recover it while they were there, to prevent us littering the ocean. To my amazement they sent, not a photograph of a piece of broken wing, but a photo of an almost intact SD127. Lost for three years, it had travelled


two-thirds of the way around Antarctica entirely by itself. Although the wing was mostly gone the hull was in one piece and this gave me new hope that it was indeed possible to circumnavigate in the Southern Ocean… and survive. Pondering on the voyage of SD127, if we


creating a huge wall of white water travel- ling at 30kt+. The small Saildrone, measur- ing just 5m tall, gets buried and rolled by the many tons of white water, giving the wing little chance of survival. Inertial measurement unit sensors (IMU) on the vehicle measured the incredible forces


40 SEAHORSE


imposed in these knockdowns, rolling 90° in less than a second. This equates to a 2.4g knockdown, an incident that would roll and dismast even the toughest of yachts. Was it ever going to be possible to make something robust enough to survive these conditions for long periods of continuous operation?


could only make the wing indestructible while maintaining control and communica- tion, we could probably get around Ant - arctica. Thinking back to Magellan’s ship, Victoria, and also my own experiences on square-rig vessels, while slow and ineffi- cient, square sails were very simple and the


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