Marion island

27 December
We arrived at Marion and Prince Edward islands around dinner time on the 25th of December. The weather has been bad and the swell quite high.

First order of business was to map the sea floor to prepare for collecting benthic samples (dredging). The ship working all night, but the swell did not allow us to do a good quality mapping.
Early morning on December 26 the helicopters started dropping people off to the island. There were several teams that went to collect water and air samples, core lakes and study bird colonies. I have to say I was jealous that they get to go and see something different. The weather wasn't particularly good, but anchored at the Lee of the island the ship rocked only slightly (about 1m swell). Feels like a stable ground for now, we don't even have to secure things!

While the ship is stopped I decided to reorganize my atmospheric cargo and finally connect my snow particle instruments to the data loggers. It wasn't as easy of a task as I hoped, but i succeeded to connect the SPC. Big  thanks to the systems engineer Carlos, who helped me configure the connection. I am working on wenglors and programming the Campbell 1000 today, but in case we do start moving - i need to repack and secure  all my cargo first.
The wind is really strong today, so the helicopters are not flying at the moment. We have a few people stuck on Marion island, which they probably enjoy - they are saying the base is quite nice and people working at Marion are quite keen to see new faces. If we don't recover our passengers tonight we might stay at Marion longer. This puts us even more behind schedule...