Brief note here – another change of weather, another change of plan. Chief Scientist Sebastien and Cap’n John decided to have another go at Glider 486, so we swung around again and bore down on the wayward little robot.
Even with GPS homing signals, looking for a six-foot tube bobbing in eight thousand miles of water is a good reminder of how big the ocean really is. And watching the Captain delicately maneuver our eighty thousand ton ship alongside the glider in wind and waves was another object lesson in Newtonian dynamics and orders of magnitude. But as those of us who have little experience with gaffing poles and grapplings hooks watched from the breezeway, Cap’n John sidled up beside, then John Kemp, Josh, Barry, Mike, Miles and Mark coaxed the little guy aboard. Gravity Falls viewers should know that Mabel would be proud.
Glider off the starboard, Cap’n!
Mike’s been waiting to use that grappling hook from day one.
Somewhere in the Slocum User Manual, there is undoubtedly a note that grappling hooks are not the retrieval method of choice, but sometimes you’ve just got to get the job done.
Reeling her in…
Barry’s on backup
Welcome aboard, little traveler…
David Pablo Cohn 
I look forward to the children’s book version of this story, The Wayward Little Robot.
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The crew is lucky to have you as the photographer.
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The picture of the glider with its wings reminds me of a friend’s story about a season he spent fishing for halibut on the West Greenland ice shelf. They used a fishing weight shaped like a space shuttle that they dropped through a hole in the ice. It glided under the ice pulling about a kilometer of line with lots of hooks. After the line sat on the bottom for a while, some of the crew grabbed the end of the line and walked away from the hole. Others unhooked fish as they emerged from the hole and stacked them like cordwood. The fish froze immediately. Every few weeks a ship stopped by to pick up their catch.
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