Abstract: Demonstrating the feasibility of operating the Saildrone in the northern Gulf of Mexico within a high amount of maritime activity, including commercial and recreational fishing, shipping, and oil and gas platforms and associated servicing vessels. Demonstrate the utility of “high-speed” (up to 9 knots) wind-propelled surface vehicles as fast adaptive sampling response tools and to effectively fill in gaps between moorings at separations greater than the local correlation length scales; Collect a dataset that can be used for regional ecosystem model development and for designing the observational systems needed for process studies of shelf-ocean exchange phenomena of import to the carbon cycle in the Gulf.