Did 44066 Go Dark?

Yesterday, Feb 26, I went online to check out the status of the latest drifting 44066/TT4 buoy.
It has been consistently drifting pretty Easterly for the past month transmitting good data.
Of course who really needs this data? It is so far away and in the middle of the Atlantic, but it is fun tracking it.  Having been involved from the beginning I feel connected and like to keep an eye out and share info for those of you who are interested. Getting this buoy deployed was major cooperation among government agencies and us ocean using stakeholders.

As of yesterday ( see post below), I posted a last line on the post something about a contest.
I was excited about bringing some late winter online fun to readers.

So, today I go on line to see what the ocean conditions were and how they might have subsided.

You can imagine my shock when I noticed that the last data upload from the buoy was one hour after
my last view and NOTHING was transmitted more than an hour later. It appears that the equipment has failed, again, probably due to the 40mph winds and 25 foot waves hitting her for several hours. Maybe she got tipped over, dunked or smashed on a wave wall. Maybe a passing ship nicked her but no way of knowing that. But that is probably unlikely since the Bermuda Cargo Lines spotted her and verified that her light was working. BCL also verified that they were able to spot her on radar for miles so other ocean going ships would have the same capability. The reason for not seeing updated data on the NDBC website is unclear but my worst fears of a damaged buoy are beginning to surface, or subsurface as the case may be!

Here are the last observations on the NDBC site yesterday. I separated them so you could see the
conditions and changes.

YYYY MM DD hh      LAT       LON  WD WSPD  GST WVHT  DPD  BARO   ATMP  WTMP  

                                 deg  kts  kts   ft  sec   mb    degC  degC 

Data found this morning 1 hour after posting latest position. Last posting.

2012 02 26 14  38.0449  -61.9210 297 29.3 38.5 25.7 13.8 1013.6  12.0  19.2 

Data used to determine location of 44066 Feb 26   

2012 02 26 13  38.0528  -61.9477 291 27.2 43.5 25.0 12.9 1013.1  10.9  19.2  

This is such a strange development. Having just been somewhat optimistic about the  buoy continuing to transmit after almost 2 months of drifting, it now seems that she has gone dark.

This needs to be verified by NDBC. It is possible that for some reason the servers at NDBC are down, but we'll just have to wait and see.

This information will be updated when NDBC clarifies the situation.