Some good news and a languorous day
Since the airwaves were buzzing with our looking for good vessels to rent, propagation of this need finally resulted in a couple of reasonable leads.
Renato Caldas and João Pereira spent a substantial part of the day calling contacts culled from Nuno Lourenço and the local Maritime Police authorities as well as IPMA folks. Finally two viable leads came thru; one a small vessel adequate for AUV ops, the other a large(r) ship with a sizable crane for the brief mission to deploy the WaveGlider sitting on the Diplodus since we arrived.
Meanwhile, in discussing model validation, Javier suggested that it might be worth throwing some drifters in the waters with our SPOT tags attached. João Pereira (he seems to be doing everything!!) volunteered to make the tags and drogue it at 2m depth to follow surface currents. So João Pereira managed to get stuff together to build the drifters.
After the hectic morning, Nuno Lourenço was seen off back to Lisbon after a slow lunch. The day was warm with light winds. We felt pretty good after so long.