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Gps Tracking In Bottles


Cushag

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Think the Chile one is a wind up mate.

That it may or not be. However it still isn't too optimistic for the bottles to reach the Chatham Islands, considering the ducks fell of the ship in the Pacific and there are confirmed reports of them being found in the Atlantic, and unconfirmed reports of them being found in Scotland.

 

My original figure of 10,000 was wrong there was a total of 29,000 toys in all.

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I agree it’s not impossible but it may take more the a few weeks to get there. I noticed one from Florida as well. Seems a bit far fetched to get there in such a short time. The Queen Mary’s crossing of the Atlantic was five days.

I believe that the ducks have supposedly been frozen in the artic for a while. But going off the actual area of the world I think I have a greater chance of winning the lottery than a bottle washing up on the shore of the Island.

Good luck to the project though. Mind you I bet a GPS transmiter bottle would start alarm bells ringing in some parts of the world :blink:

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When the Flotta oil terminal in the Orkneys was being planned for the development of what became the Piper and Claymore oil fields, it was necesssary to quantify exactly what might be the areal extent of an oil spill. The currents in and around Scapa Flow, especially through the Pentland Firth, are ferocious as well as highly complex and the

technology to study and mathematically model the progress of an accidental spill simply did not exist.

 

A very clever hydrographer, who became my mentor, devised an ingeniously simple way to monitor where an oil slick would go. He discovered that ordinary blank credit cards floating on the sea react almost exactly the same way to the effects of wind, current and waves as medium density crude oil. By launching 100 cards every hour for 14 days, and tracking their progress, his scheme produced the source data for a mathematical model which is to this day a prime source of information from which many very successful mathematical models of oil slick propagation throughout the

tidal cycle. We did not have GPS in those days of course. This was the 1970s.

 

Most of the cards were float-tracked by traditional hydrographic position-fixing methods, but each one was printed with a promise of a Pound for anyone who found one on a beach and who returned it to a Freepost address with a description

of the time and place of the find.

 

An amusing film, called Local Hero, was based upon the acquisition and development of this site. The megalomaniac character played by Burt Lancaster was called Arnold Happer in the movie. He was directly based upon the boss of Occidental: Armand Hammer. The Hydrographer, based upon my mentor, was played by Rikki Fulton, and Dennis's real-life daughter, Lindsey, who was dropdead gorgeous, was played by Jenny Seagrove and renamed Marina for the movie. The young, inexperienced, gangly, lovesick (for 'Marina') polyglot Hydrographic Surveyor called Oldsen in the

movie, played by Peter Capaldi, was based upon somebody or other who also had a ubiqitous Scandiwegian surname.

 

Ah yes. Memories!

 

Cheers, The Forester

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More Flotsam. Last year on the Isle of Man the beaches were inundated with thousands of Pampers Baby Wipes in the plastic refill cover form. They were in a container that was washed overboard in a storm in the Sea off Ireland. I am still finding them washing up with the tide on occasions and that is months later. They are not usable by the way! I have a good selection of Plastic Commercial Fish Boxes in good condition, very useful for all that camping junk, collected from the shoreline on the IOM. Most come from Ireland according to the Logos but I have had a Scottish one. I have yet to find that elusive floating geocache or a duck.

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