Crowd sourcers Needed: view satellite images

Quote: blount2000

Gonna keep on keeping on, though!

As they used to say in those wine cooler commercials "We thank you for your support".
Parents of Danielle Wright are flying to Australia so Ricky Wright will be able to crew the rescue plane that is finally going to be able to take off to intercept what New Zealand and Australian newspapers have referred to as a ghost ship. Its a satellite image of a boat of about the same size and shape as the Nina adrift west of Norfolk Island.

NZ authorities do not consider it sufficient to re-start the search.

More than five months after an American yacht with seven people aboard disappeared in the Tasman Sea, a new private aerial search is getting under way this morning. A Piper Twin Comanche is due to take off from Norfolk Island, 1070 kilometres north of Auckland, to search an area between Norfolk and Australia.

With seven people aboard, Nina left Opua, in the Bay of Islands on May 29 bound for Newcastle, Australia. It was last heard from on June 4, when conditions in the Tasman were very rough. On June 25 the Rescue Co-ordination Centre (RCCNZ) launched what turned into one of their biggest-ever searches but with nothing found, suspended it on, July 4.

The private search is funded by families of the missing seven through a Facebook page. They say they have enough funding to keep searching until the end of the week. Families remain convinced the 85-year-old Nina is dismasted but floating in the Tasman, caught in the circular currents. Both RCCNZ and the US State Department are convinced there is no evidence the boat is still afloat. Maritime experts believe the 85-year-old yacht suffered a catastrophic failure and sank immediately without trace.

Family hopes have been kept going by 3.2 million grainy pictures of 500,000 square kilometres of the Tasman released to families by the New York Stock Exchange listed DigitalGlobe. The company, which has five spy satellites and works mostly for the US military and intelligence services, is prohibited by US law from releasing its highest definition pictures. Not only have the pictures been grainy and difficult to read, but they have also been slow to make it to an online crowdsourcing site where 13,000 volunteers search looking for Nina.

The families believe an image captured on September 16 was of Nina, but by the time any kind of search could be launched, it was 10 days old. The object seen in the picture has not been found again nor properly identified.

The parents of Danielle Wright are in the area and are participating in the search efforts.
Ricky Wright, Danielle's father, is taking flying lessons so as to be able to keep up the search if the present level of funding tapers off.

Rogue wave got em. I hate the ocean.

Quote: Evenbob

Rogue wave got em. I hate the ocean.

It would be the Sea. The Tasman Sea is of course usually referred to as The Ditch.

Rogue wave?

That is unlikely but quite possible. Usually its larger ships that are vulnerable to a rogue wave. Particularly if the Nina was motoring NW under bare poles and not under any sail at all, it would seem unlikely for a rogue wave to have affected her so catastrophically as there was absolutely no debris of any sort located.

I fail to understand the extreme hopefulness of the Wrights concerning their only child. What does he think? He will get a pilot's license and find his daughter still doing the backstroke while awaiting rescue six months later?

The search was delayed, much of it was in the wrong area but time goes by and there are no sightings even with the aid of digital satellite images. Yes, some extreme outliers exist. Boats that were indeed adrift in and near the Tasman Sea for long periods, but when do you shift from hope to reasonable hope?

Sure, I'm still viewing images. Why not.

Quote:

Sure, I'm still viewing images. Why not.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11150978

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11140086

I confess to no longer looking.

Quote: odiousgambit

I confess to no longer looking.

The project was poorly structured.
There were few instructions and no feedback. Some people seemed to be clicking on every thing others were not clicking on anything at all. There were cloud formations in many shapes some could vaguely be imagined to be a ship, we didn't know what to do. I saw a perfectly square cloud, I've never seen one in nature so I clicked on the darn thing thinking that it could be the reflection of the morning sun off a square life raft. The trouble is we never got any feedback as to how clear and sharp an image we were looking for? A distinct yacht? Or subtle wave actions that left that yacht like shadow?

No one could tell when a map fully loaded. No one knew how many maps were left to go.

It was discouraging when one "hit" made the papers because it really did look like a yacht of the right size and shape but once the image was tagged, the yacht was not later locatable. Did is sail off, sink, never exist, what?

What about vast areas that were naught but cloud cover? What about populous shipping lanes wherein physical sightings are possible as opposed to the open sea where satellite is the only chance? We just didn't know.

As with many searches, by the time the yacht is overdue, what ever may have happened has happened weeks before.

The initial searches were in the wrong area. Well, that has happened before. Do you value a digital geoposition over a textual position report from a navigator who is a math professor with a reputation for always knowing exactly where she is? Over the Tasman Sea the Spot Beacon gave TWO position reports, seven hundred miles apart that were separated by seven seconds. Now that is a Speed Over The Water that would be envied in any yacht race! Which do you believe? The first, the second, an average of the two?

There are the outlier reports of yachts drifting ashore after several weeks without any prior sightings. How many yachts drift but are sighted?

Its hard when "modern electronics" are not aboard.

Most yachts leave some debris. Certainly the text message of 'Motoring NW under bare poles' means they had survived the storm.

Anyone know the depths of the Tasman Sea?

Can we unleash a camera and find the keel a mile from the yacht? Or what?

The yacht was depicted as very sea worthy when it arrived but barely sea worthy when it left. That seems to be a report that a politician would favor. And lo and behold... when you trace those "un-seaworthy" reports you do find a politician and not a particularly nautically qualified one at that: "Russ Rimmington wouldn't know poo from chewed dates if he tasted it. He's an ex-advertising business owner and ex-local body politician who sailed offshore without knowing how to turn on the radar that he'd had fitted to the yacht."
>What an absolute load of rubbish the media in NZ has become...
Well, the media could at least have pointed out the Evi was a skilled yachtsman who left her boat and joined the Nina after having made a close inspection of it. This rather should squelch the "un seaworthy" tattoo that is heard but it does not.

I guess I'll die with two big mysteries unsolved: JonBenet Ramsey and the S/V Nina.



I

The Wrights have a very realistic out look on what could have happened to the Nina. They also have a very good handle on why the boat is likely afloat. There is a lot that has not been made public and if it were, one could make that rational conclusion.

John Glennie survived 119 days on the East side of New Zealand in an over turned trimaran. He says if the Nina is afloat, the crew is alive. He said he and his three crew mate would have survived another 6 months if they had to.

The search needs all the help it can get looking at the Tomnod images. Sure, they are not perfect, there are some problems, but it is all we have right now. Several boats have spent considerable time in the Tasman Sea unspotted. The Scotch Bonnet took nearly 6 months to drift from near the last known position of the Nina to Australia. It was only spotted once. An Oyster Barge spent a year crossing the Tasman this year, and was only spotted near shore. Once it go into the thick of the Tasman, no one saw it.

No one in the Nina rescue effort is paid. Not the executive coordinator, Ralph Baird who has contributed over $120K in billable hours, not the volunteer NASA scientists, not the experts from Digital Globe, not the thousands of volunteers looking at images. The big expenses are for flight time which is paid, and even some of that may now be made a gift. People who can't see why anyone would work this hard for no monetary reward are people who don't understand altruism.

At the end of the day, if the Nina is not found, it will likely wash up on an Australian beach. The fate of the crew is less certain.

Meanwhile, the crowd sourcing concept is being tested and may prove to make a difference in the arsenal of search and rescue tools which save lives.

http://gcaptain.com/satellite-imagery-future-search-and-rescue/

Hi Tim,

Likely afloat?
I don't know.
Probably too little data to calculate probabilities of hitting a derelict container or a slumbering whale.
Certainly they are out of diesel fuel even if the engine was working okay, so only manual pumping. If damaged its hard to pump a wobbly for so many weeks with few decent meals and no decent sleep.
Rose Noelle was flipped by winds but not damaged, but catamarans and trimarans are subject to that, monohulled yachts are less likely to be capsized, particularly with such experienced sailors aboard. Even tons of cascading water from a breaking rogue wave pouring into the cockpit would be difficult but they were alert sailors and knew where the EPIRB was bracketed. Even if the Nina pitch poled under in one fell swoop, the EPIRB would have floated to the surface as would cushions, bedding, crew members, etc.
I think RCCNZ was too quick to search the wrong area and too slow to realize that radar doesn't do too well in a search for a wooden boat covered in fiberglass. RCCNZ should have realized that a racing schooner was designed for speed and would make good time in stormy weather.

You make some great points.

No one knows what happened to the Nina. What we do know is, after the most exhaustive search in the history of NZ RCC, not a single sign of the boat has been spotted. As you say, there are clear problems with the NZ search including the use of the wrong coordinates and radar that would not likely pick up a wooden boat. The fact they could not find them is little evidence she sank.

Given that information, if the Nina was afloat after the big storm, there is no reason to believe the Nina is not afloat today. The Tasman Sea is full of boats which disappeared for up to a year in the reverse circulating currents, only to get spit out on an Australian beach. We have been fighting people's belief there could be survivors this late. John Glennie, who lived in an overturned yacht, perched on a bed sized platform jury rigged after the capsize. He and his 3 man crew were eventually able to cut a hole in the bottom of the boat which was now effectively the top of the boat. But they slept in the cabin perched above the water which had filled the cabin with only 18 inches of headroom. There was so little room, they slept "spoon style". When one person turned over, they all had to turn over. Every 4 hours they had to get up and reverse positions because the person on the outside got too cold. Glennie says they could have survived for 6 months more.

If the Nina is up, then the crew is in infinite better conditions than Glennie had. There would be more food from the very start. Glennie and crew lost most of their stores when the overturned trimaran filled with water. Fresh water supplies drained into the ocean the first day after the boat flipped. The Nina had major stores. They would be out of fuel, I agree, which explains the communications black out. They may also have had a lightning strike.

So that leaves us 7 people floating around the Tasman Sea, running low on food, and desperately needing help.