A cruising family sailing from French Polynesia to Hawaii has recovered the University of Washington’s Seaglider, an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that had malfunctioned while on a mission in the Pacific and was stranded midocean and nearly out of battery power. The family from the Pearson 424 Oatmeal Savage learned about the errant Seaglider after SAIL and others posted a story saying the UW students were seeking any help from sailors in the area to retrieve their hot-pink AUV, which they affectionately had named “Pigeon” for the birds who always return home.
“Finding something in the big open ocean is really hard,” says Frances Van Tol, who with her husband, Matt, 16-year-old daughter Piper, and 13-year-old son Digory, was on passage back home to British Columbia after a taking a year off and sailing Oatmeal Savage to French Polynesia. “We practice all these man overboard drills, but I was just like, don’t fall off the boat. Even with six pairs of eyes, it was really hard to find and then took all of us to retrieve it.”
“They said the hot pink was one of the key things that helped them see it,” says Katie Kohlman, a PhD candidate and chief scientist of UW’s Student Seaglider Center. “Everything had to go right, and they all worked together, there was good communication the entire time. They’re really a great family.”
The UW students, working in the Student Seaglider Center, a student-run lab within UW’s School of Oceanography, deployed the Seaglider last November in the equatorial Pacific to collect oceanographic data in a little traveled or researched area. It was an ambitious experiment, supported by Ellie Brosius, the chief engineer who led the rebuild and tech behind Pigeon, and Kohlman, who joined researchers from WHOI, Scripps, APL (the UW Applied Physics Lab), and OSU investigating mixing beneath Tropical Instability Waves (TIWs) in the equatorial Pacific. “These TIWs, large wave-like meanders along the equator, influence ocean mixing, air-sea interactions, biological productivity, and even global climate patterns,” Layla Airola, the center’s chief business officer, outlined in an overview of the mission. “Pigeon was programmed to fly herself nearly 1,300 miles from the equator to Hawaii, collecting data all the way.”
But about three months into the mission, the pilots realized something was wrong.
“It was flying a little strangely,” Kohlman says. “It made less efficient progress going to Hawaii. We were monitoring the battery usage and realized it’s not going make it, it’s going to die before it gets to Hawaii.”
By May 26, the battery had died and the AUV could no longer dive; it stayed surfaced. A separate battery that powered its GPS, however, was still working, so it continued pinging its location. In a desperate attempt to find the proverbial needle in the haystack, Airola contacted SAIL and a few other publications and asked if they could get the word out to anyone on passage in the area.
Enter, Oatmeal Savage, who learned of the AUV via a WhatsApp net that cruisers in the area were using for communication, and where the story was shared.
“It was like a day or two out of the way,” Frances Van Tol says. “We brought it up with the kids and asked if it was something they’d be willing to spend some extra time onboard” to get the glider. They were all for it.
However, before they could adjust their course for the AUV, disaster befell their buddy boat, a Dehler 39 called Flow who was about 200 miles behind them. Their rudder had fallen off, and they had to abandon their boat. Oatmeal Savage immediately turned around and rendezvoused with the crippled Flow, retrieving the crew of two safely. At that point, Van Tol says, they didn’t even bring up the idea of rescuing the glider, because their friends “were in a bit of a state.”
“But a day or two later we were freakishly on track for it,” she says. They decided to go for it, and working directly with Kohlman to receive constantly updated position reports, they closed in on the glider’s location. Meantime, Kohlman and others wrote up instructions for them on how to safely grab the glider without damaging its instruments.
Once they found it on June 5, Van Tol says, the two extra crew proved invaluable, as it took all six of them to grab the AUV and hoist it onto the boat’s swim platform with the mizzen halyard, where it remained until arrival in Hawaii.
“It’s 120 pounds and six-and-half feet long, so it was not itty-bitty,” Van Tol says. “We couldn’t have retrieved it without them. It was quite something and we are really grateful they were there…I was saying after that was just on the edge of being dangerous. The seas were a little higher than we were thinking, it was sunny and midday, but the sea state wasn’t great. But with the extra help, we got it. Had it been a little more rough, we may not have been able to do it, which would have been a shame.”
As soon as they knew Oatmeal Savage had rescued Pigeon, Kohlman and team member Paige McKay grabbed a flight to Hilo, Hawaii, where they met the boat and were reunited with their Seaglider. Matt Van Tol and Kohlman trundled it to shore in Oatmeal Savage’s dinghy so that it could return to UW for repair and hopefully future assignment.
When she saw the glider, Kohlman says, it was quickly obvious why it had been having difficulty; a part of the rudder had broken off.
“It still was flying without a critical component, which was incredible,” she says. “We don’t know how the rudder was damaged. These are old gliders, these are 15-20 years old, and some of the components are plastic.”
A new one, she says, can cost about $200,000 from the Applied Physics Lab at UW. Because the Student Seaglider Center doesn’t have that kind of money, they get old gliders that are no longer being used and bring them up to speed. They have four total; two are deployed in Puget Sound, and the other two can be deployed where the students’ research requires.
“The students I work with are incredibly capable and talented to get them up and running again, and this Pigeon just shows that,” Kohlman says. “I never gave up hope, I knew we would see it again somehow, hopefully.”
They were able to provide the crew of Oatmeal Savage with a financial thanks for their efforts, about $7,000. Frances Van Tol says that wasn’t the motivating factor for the rescue, but she acknowledges that her kids are happy that their allowances, “which have been a little chintzy” while cruising, got a boost.
“This is affording us a little bit of latitude to have a bit more fun,” she says. “We’re nearing the end of our trip, so everything is a little tighter. Life is catching up pretty fast, so this is a nice little boost, to have some fun at the end.”
