Wednesday and still no news on when the Diplodus would be up and running. Just that a critical part would arrive. Tomorrow. More importantly with the Marinha stepping in, we got ready in the morning for another cruise, only to be told that the swells out in the ocean were heavy and launch and recovery operations were deemed hazardous. We knew that the weather was changing and today and tomorrow, Thursday, things would be tight. So no missions either today or tomorrow, with the expectation that we (and when and if) the Diplodus got underway, we will be working thru the weekend, all the way till the May 23rd end of experiment. So this was our weekend!

And so we sat down to look at doing some bug fixes and some tool development. Our outreach efforts at the middle school in the Porto area have resulted in the students wanting to 'name' the fish, keeping in mind they can observe them via the HUB remotely (names received this far include 'FF' and 'Rambo'!). So we have a mechanism with tag numbers and associated meta-information in a google doc, which can be parsed and pushed out to the HUB (and ultimately Neptus). A simple and cool way to get kids involved. We of course plan to have them talk to our crew out at sea and on shore.

Lunch was in a good traditional Portuguese restaurant our host recommended in downtown Tavira, with a brief walk around to get acquianted. Its too bad that none of us have had the time to go exploring around.

Strategic discussions on how we should continue to plan and respond to evolving events with Kanna, Joao, Javier and Nuno ensued. At 7pm Javier gave an informal talk about ocean modeling and the fragility of predictions to all of us in the central room and discussions ensued. The day wrapped up with dinner with the TV tuned to a UEFA cup final between Benfica (Lisbon) and Seville. Benfica lost.