Discovery Board

The real winds make the 375-mile drift easy in distance, but she must have sailed across the wind, not just drifted

scripts/celeste_obs.py, celeste_drift.py. Slate position 37.02 N 24.97 W at 09:40 UTC 25 Nov to 38.33 N 17.25 W at about 14:40 UTC 4 Dec: 375 nm toward 078 deg in 221 h, 0.87 m/s (1.7 knots). Ship winds within 3 deg of the straight line (8 of 10 days): mean speed 17.0 m/s, so she needed only 5.1 percent of the wind speed, a normal value for a derelict with some sail. But the net wind blew toward 138 deg (SE); she ended 60 deg to the left of downwind, and surface currents turn to the right of the wind, so a bare drift would have left her well south of the meeting point. With W to NNW winds a ship heading NE is on the port tack; when found (wind NNE) she was on the starboard tack heading roughly west-north-west. With the reanalysis winds alone she would have needed 23 percent of the wind speed, which is why the reanalysis was set aside.

How it connects