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| Finally a photo of a Penguin for you all, taunting the seals! |
Elephant seals have invaded our base...
This week as flown by so fast - we've crammed so much training and fun things into such a short time. However, these past few days have been too windy or too much brash ice built up in the bay to allow us to dive or collect water samples from the boat - rather frustrating!
After our first CTD, Sam and I spent the next two days in the lab processing the water to extract ammonia concentrations and fractionated the chlorophyll for our long-term plankton studies!
The next mission was to get me checked out by the current dive officer Emily, with my first dive in Antarctica just off the warf so that we could stay shallow - it was INCREDIBLE! I didn't even get cold which really surprised me! There is also so much life down there, we saw; a jellyfish, sea lemon (that was one of my first missions to see), starfish and sea urchins. The life down there is very vast.
On the weekend I Nordic skied around Rothera Point with John and Caroline -much easier to ski than walk through the freshly fallen snow and I only fell over once!
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| Caroline, John and Me |
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| Thanks to John Law for capturing this moment..... |
I then saw lots of people skiing the ramp so I decided to go and offer to skidoo people up the ramp - it is so fun being allowed to skidoo up an icy hill with skiers on the back and wizz back down!
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| Kate and me |
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| Thanks to John Law for this photo |
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| Tom and Hector! |
On Monday morning, 48 hours after diving I went on my first co-pilot trip on the twin otter with pilot Doug.
Our mission was to fly to the camp called Quebec to pick up some equipment and Bradley from a field party. After we got above the clouds and the turbulence from the wave settled down I was allowed to fly us to Quebec the field party just before the pilot took over for a circuit. The contrast for landing was very difficult as there was high cloud shadow against the snow. There was a skiway to land on our skis next to the field camp that had been tested for crevasses. When we arrived we found out that we had to load a skidoo, sledge, fuel drums and more cargo into the small plane! It took a while, but with perseverance we managed it! We then flew back to Rothera, in time for me to go to work in the afternoon.
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| Twin otter yay |
Earlier on this week Sam and I managed to drive the boat through the brash ice to get to site 3 (not the best site as it means we can only cast down to 100 m which is not as good as our usual 500 m site) to do a CTD, however, the wind was a southerly which meant it was blowing us into shallower water. After a first failed attempt we managed to get a second cast! The wind then picked up meaning that the brash ice was starting to block our exit off the warf - we hastily returned to the warf to crane the boat back onto land, ditching our hope of getting some water samples. We returned dishearted but realistic as we are in Antarctica and at the end of the day is it safer to be on the land having a cuppa instead of stuck between the ice with no way to get the boat out!
Yesterday I was on the GASH rota which is rotated around everyone. Gash includes a day in the kitchen basically being a pot washer, assistant chef and cleaner - it's actually really good fun, especially when you get annoy the chefs with your music!
The next few days we have winters team training and hopefully more diving and sampling coming up if the weather allows, the Chilean RAF are also popping through for the weekend....Phwoar.
Another Penguin photo to prove that I really am here :)
