All the lessons we had learnt from the loch tests were incorporated into the other five WIMBOs, being built down in Sussex, so it was finally time to finish and crate them for loading onto the icebreaker in Seattle, courtesy of our colleagues at the Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington. I loaded up the van and drove down to Heathfield with all the parts that had been Scottish-made, and gave everything a final check-over before we filled a cargo plane with 15 cubic metres of science stuff, yikes.

So after three months in the water, several in-water software upgrades (as in the photo below) and a few sensor swaps, we were confident that the WIMBO was working well and it was time to bring it in. The marine life had been busy and the hull sported an excellent crop of barnacles - no match for the pressure washer, fortunately.