And the rolling begins

March 1

I’m falling behind with writing my blog. Today is March 3rd and there is so much I would like to share, so I will attempt to go in the chronological order.

The ship started rolling on February 28. The weather was still sunny and relatively warm, so we did a bootcamp on the heli deck

It ended with only one casualty (a person falling on the deck while running), so I have decided to hold off the boot camp in bad weather conditions. As I realize that I’m accumulating tiredness, I need to take it down a little bit.

But the work never stops on the ship. It was raining all night and the following day as well. My colleague Pascal stayed up all night sampling precipitation, so I decided to give him a little break when I woke up and took over sampling. We have a precipitation funnel set up on the container deck (твин-дек) of the ship. I have to say as the weather got rougher I got the most spectacular views of the waves splashing onto the front of the ship. Unfortunately I couldn’t capture the most spectacular waves on camera as the minute I pulled out my phone the waves got smaller. But here are a few examples:

In the afternoon the weather became even rougher and we got banned from going outside.
I did however obtain a special permission to do some science, so Alex and I launched an XBT to get at least a temperature profile of the missed CTD station. We wenttogether for safety and decided to take an XBT selfie:

We also got to launch a radiosonde – protected by the superstructure in the shadow of the hangar we were able to inflate the balloon no problem, but it popped the minute we stepped on the heli deck. We inflated another one and Alex and Pascal successfully launched it in very high wind. We launched it outside the railing, but the balloon went back over the heli deck, avoided getting crushed in the hangar but a few meters, went over the railing the other side, dipped down closer to the water and the instruments almost touched the surface and then finally got picked up by the updraft and delivered a great profile.
We had a journalist filming us launch and to ours and his disappointment he left right after the unsuccessful attempt and did not film the colorful journey of the sonde. Oh well. At least we got a great launch out of it.

Физкульт-привет! / Heli deck boot camp

January 10
I can't believe how lucky we are to be sailing in this atypically nice weather. We have seen the sun for four days in a row (January 7 through 10), which is just amazing. And I am hoping tomorrow (January 11) will also be nice.
As we are steaming off to Hobart without any more island stops, many teams on the ship officially finished their field work for the leg. Some others are still collecting data from atmosphere and ocean. So with some spare time in hand and exceptional weather one of the BAS scientist started a boot camp on the heli deck (weather permitting). Unfortunately I haven't quite made it to a class yet, since there is always something for me to do in the middle of the day. But as I was attempting to sample the first hail event on the upper deck, I shot this picture of the boot campers exercising:

I also have to admit that hail sampling was unsuccessful, it was a fluke of an event that lasted a couple of minutes tops. By the time I got all my gear from the freezer, the hail stopped and the sun came back. It wasn't even that cold - you can see people exercising in shorts and t-shirts with an occasional sweater outside.

Exercising on a ship isn't easy. A lot of times there is too much to do. The gym has very limited equipment, and it becomes dangerous when the ship rolls. Heli deck is just about the only large flat space available. Many Russian crew members walk laps on heli deck, weather permitting. I have to applaud their patience and consistency. I personally try to do my yoga as regularly as possible. An occasional game of table tennis is the only add on I managed to do so far. I wish I was more organized about my fitness. Maybe I will manage to do the boot camp tomorrow, but once again too many things are planned for me...