Shortly after dawn on Sept. 30, 2021, Richard Jenkins watched a Category 4 hurricane overrun his life’s work. The North Atlantic storm was a behemoth — 50,000 feet tall and 260 miles wide. Wind circled the eye wall at 143 miles per hour; waves the size of nine-story apartment buildings tumbled through a confused sea.
Puerto Rico lay 500 miles to the southwest; Bermuda was 800 miles straight ahead. Eighty miles northwest, the 23-foot boat that Jenkins had designed and built over the last decade struggled to stay upright. Probes, antennae and a suite of meteorological and oceanographic instruments jutted from the deck and the hull, all powered by wind, water and sun and capable of measuring the extraordinary forces of the open ocean.
As the name suggests, SD 1045 was unmanned, allowing the boat to operate in some of the most remote and inhospitable corners of the planet for up to 12 months at a time without being serviced. Saildrone Explorer SD 1045 was a research boat. Its blaze-orange torpedo-shaped hull had a deep keel and a rigid carbon-fiber sail engineered to withstand hurricane-force wind and waves. Throughout history, most sea captains have tried to steer their vessels out of extreme weather, but the whole purpose of SD 1045 was to steer into it…
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