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The 1997 Iberia experiment, offshore Spain, included deployments of 33 UTIG OBS instruments.  Unfortunately, only 31 were recovered.  However, on April 4, 1999, UTIG received a message from a student on the French West Indies island of Guadeloupe - the OBS had been found!  In 20 months it had crossed the Atlantic Ocean, probably due to the circulation of the North Atlantic gyre.

Ben Yates (above), an OBS engineer at UTIG, flew down to Guadeloupe (below) to retrieve the instrument.  When he brought it back to Austin he could not spin up the disk, so he sent it off to a data recovery firm.  They discovered salt (from a small amount of seawater that had penetrated the protective glass sphere) on the heads, but once they cleaned the disk they were able to recover almost all of the data!  The instrument is now being refurbished for its next experiment - a cruise to Bransfield Strait, Antarctica.