Weather buoy sails away from mooring

By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Staff Writer

Buoy One, the weather buoy that warns the Islands of storm surf coming from the north and west, has broken free from its mooring and is apparently snagged on a reef near Nihoa Island.

The buoy is still transmitting its full data package of wave height, temperature and other data, so surfers and others interested in the information should not notice the change.

The Coast Guard cutter Kukui is scheduled to leave Honolulu Friday to retrieve the buoy and re-anchor it at its normal location if a mooring system is available.

Buoy One, or more properly Buoy 51001, appears to have broken free of its mooring about 1 a.m. Friday. It is about 23 miles from its normal spot.

National Weather Service meteorologist-in-charge Jim Weyman said forecasters believe it may have dragged thousands of feet of mooring cable with it, allowing it to snag on a deep reef in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. At its normal location the water is two miles deep, and the mooring cable is somewhat longer than that to allow enough slack to account for waves and tides.

Weather officials in the past have had difficulty with vandalism and misuse of the buoy. Boaters have tied up to the buoy, which puts stresses on the mooring for which it was not designed, and thieves have stolen equipment from the buoy. It was not clear what caused the mooring to break in this case.

Buoy 51001 is a Nomad-class buoy, operated by the National Data Buoy Center. It is a 19-foot-long bright yellow vessel, shaped like a boat and powered by batteries that are recharged by solar photovoltaic cells. It is one of four buoys anchored around the Hawaiian Islands to provide advance warning of weather patterns approaching the main islands. The buoys have instruments that measure wind speed and direction, sea and air temperatures, sea-level pressure, wave height and wave energy at various frequencies.

The information is transmitted hourly to a satellite, and is available on the Web.