A working sunday
Sunday was not precisely a day of 'rest'. Just slightly slower paced with the meticulous tag making process consuming a lot of man (and woman) hours of the team. With the morning effectively working on that, João and Kanna strategized with João Pereira and Nuno Queiroz on Mola numbers in the Tuna pen (they start dwindling about now, so we need to get to the water) and doing contingency planning for boats, including calling up local fishing boats which can be adequate to deploying the AUVs if not flying the UAVs from their decks.
A brief respite with a (soggy) pizza lunch and continuing work on tags and planning. It was suggested that with no ops on the water on Monday (12th) that the AUV team stands down while the UAV team could test how flying and imaging a tag from 100m would look. Nuno constructed a fake 'Mola' out of styrofoam and it was taped to look like the real thing and a tag was tethered to it. Come Monday, with the help of the Maritime Police we hope to deploy this 'Mola' near Vila Real de Santo António and fly UAVs just like we did Friday. Four real Mola's in turn are going to be tagged and released by Nuno and his team in anticipation of an AUV mission on board a hired vessel or a Navy vessel Tuesday morning.
Of course with the understanding that 'all work and no play, makes Jack a ...' everyone took the later afternoon off and letting off steam by jumping in the pool. A short dinner at our regular restaurant followed with a return to the farm house by 10pm in anticipatio for the next days activities.