Atlantic Rising Buoy Arrives in South America

Quick Search

Atlantic Rising Buoy Arrives in South America

28/3/2010

We received an email this morning from Will Lorimer, one of the Atlantic Rising organisers - their buoy, dropped in the middle of the Atlantic last month, has washed up on the South American shore. Their email speaks for itself:

"A fantastic moment for demonstrating the incredible precision of Yellowbrick. Early this morning our capsule was picked up in the ocean. At 11am it emitted a signal showing that it had been taken ashore near Fortaleza. Due to Yellowbrick's precision mapping we were able to zoom in to exactly where it was. This proved to be the swimming pool of a beachfront hotel. Using Google maps we managed to locate the hotel as The Golden Tulip, one of Fortaleza's smartest hotel.

Two minutes later we were on the phone to the concierge. Is there somebody lying near your pool with a 1.5m capsule on the sun lounger next to them? The concierge was somewhat confused, but he said he would go and check. Ten minutes later he comes back in a state of high excitement. There was nothing by the pool, but he had looked over the front balcony (out onto the beach) and seen 2 fishermen wrapping up their nets with the capsule sitting right next to them (not more than 20ft from the hotel). He ran onto the beach and explained to the fishermen that the buoy was property of the CIA (I am not joking) and that they had to give to him right away. They obliged.

So he then phoned us back on his mobile (he couldn't use the hotel phone because the buoy smelt so much of rotten fish that they wouldn't allow it into the hotel), saying he was in possession of the buoy and that everything about it looked fine. Excellent news!

Fortunately, Fortaleza is on our route north, so we will stop off there and get local schools involved in writing back to the students' letters.

However, none of this would have been possible without the fantastic technology that you guys provide. It is a testament to the accuracy of the tracker and efficiency of your computer mapping system that we were able to find it in the first place. So thank you very much. It also means that we can take the buoy and the tracker north with us and do a second Message in a Bottle project when we are crossing back to UK."

For more info, please visit the Atlantic Rising site - http://www.atlanticrising.org/