Dirty Dog

I went home to get lunch and found that my dog Heidi had managed to get the gate open and escape from the back yard. Seconds later she ran up to me; she had decided to go exploring in one of the salt marshes/mudholes that surround our neighborhood. Normally she's black on her back and tan on her legs and lower body, but today she was a solid black dog. I barely recognized her. I just bathed her yesterday.

A minor panic today as we seem to have stopped receiving data via the Argos satellite system for our Cape Lookout buoy. After some investigation it looks like it's still sitting out there, though. At least it answers the cell phone, so it can't be too far away. If I could figure out the cell phone data transfer connection well enough I could get its GPS location, but it's complicated and out tech that wrote the software and understands it is out of town. It's a bad day for this to happen, since all the people in Chapel Hill that understand the thing seem to be on vacation too.

My advisor wants us to spend some more time trying to find the lost CTD. I'm willing to do it, but somehow we need to be more intelligent about it. We spent way too much time Friday dragging locations that were too far from the GPS waypoint we set when we realized the thing was lost, due to currents and a GPS that kept cutting out. And I'm not entirely sure all our grapnels were actually on the bottom the whole time. We've talked about borrowing a sonor system from the marine fisheries people, and maybe there are some other things we can use, but the main thing is to spend more time dragging the right location. A capstan would help too, so we would have to haul the grapnels up by hand.