Grytviken, South Georgia

March 2

This is another post I have been meaning to write for a few days, but did not get around to.
On Thursday March 2 a lot of us not sampling on the islands got a chance to go to shore and be tourists for a day. And oh my god was it an amazing day.

The storm was approaching, but still quite ways behind us and sheltered by a little bay we had the most perfect day one can imagine. It was warm, almost windless, sunny and gorgeous when we landed on South Georgia around lunchtime. We walked along the beach toward Shackelton grave. We were greeted by the locals:

King penguin

Antarctic fur seal 

Elephant seal

Some locals were more open to a dialogue, while others were less pleased and roared on us. 

The ones that roared do not get a privilege to be part of this blog ;)

We then continued on to visit the Argentinian helicopter crash site. I was walking with my favorite helicopter engineer Ian, whom I mentioned several times in this blog as he has been super helpful with launching SOCCOM floats and finding creative solutions to fix  various things that needed fixing. Ian was quite keen to visit the crash site, as he was in the Navy during the Falkland war and remembers it quite vividly. We found the helicopter in a despicable condition - even Ian couldn't fix it anymore.

Ian at the crashed helicopter site with Tryoshnikov in the background.

After visiting the site, we had to hurry back to the main pier - we were due back on the ship in a couple of hours and I was keen to visit the post office and send some postcards. They were ridiculously expensive, but who cares, I spent all the UK pounds I borrowed. Due to the time and price limitations, I only managed to send a few, but hopefully within the next few months some of you will get them.

The weather started to turn as the storm was catching up with us. It got worse and then worse and then much worse during the following days. I already published a post out-of-order about the rolling we experienced on March 5. By then we were banned from going outside onto the deck.

Here's a little visual for you.

This was the view of South Georgia in the morning of March 2nd

And this is the view the following day.

We are still in the storm, but the worst part is hopefully over for us. We are still rolling somewhat, but nothing compared to the angles we experiences all last night and through the day. We have big plans to continue work tomorrowas all ocean work was suspended due to bad weather.

Peter the 1st

February,17

On Wednesday February 15 we arrived at Peter the 1st island. It is located at roughly 90 degrees west - which marks about 70% of the longitudinal journey we have to complete during all three legs. Longitude-wise leg 2 is the most intense and it is also the longest. Ship lag is definitely upon us all...

When we first got the sea ice maps for Peter the 1st island it looked unapproachable. We almost ditched it completely from the program, but the sea ice seemed less intense later and we decided to try. We got into heavy sea ice late morning on the 15th and woke up many seals resting on ice floes:

I have never seen so many seals at the same time, I was taking pictures and videos and I couldn't get enough. I guess they did not expect us at all!

The views of the island were memorizing:

There were all forms of ice all around us - sea ice, iceberg, glaciers, etc. Even though we did not have much time to spare, we decided to use this opportunity to visit the island and collect some samples: drill an ice core, collect biological and geological samples from the beaches and collected some sea ice for the biological analyses. Helicopters and Zodiacs once again were busy for a quite a few hours delivering multiple parties to different locations, which provided good news from our upper deck "office balcony":

Leaving Marion Island

28 December
I am happy to report we safely recovered our people from Marion island and are currently underway. It was a really pretty and unusual to see land while at sea and we will enjoy views of many more islands.
Here's a picture from yesterday overlooking the helicopters parked on the helo deck and some interesting cloud formation in the background. Too bad we could not launch a radiosonde to get data from the vertical profile. We usually launch from the helo deck and cannot operate while the helicopters are out of the hangar.

The weather was much nicer today so we did a lot of different things. We did a 200m CTD cast, deployed nets to collects zooplankton, deployed nets that scrape the sea floor to collect benthic species, launches a radiosonde. We were gonna end the day with a 1km CTD cast followed by a 1km trace metal rosette cast, but things got a little off track. We lost communication with the normal rosette half way, so spent the rest of the evening trouble shooting. Trace metal rosette was successful in principal, although we did not collect many water samples. But all in all it was an extremely busy day for many science teams and for the ship's crew.

***
Aside from science life on the icebreaker goes on. We have been sailing for a week now and the days are starting to look more and more routine. The meal schedule keeps us on track :). This never changing meal schedule that my grandfather described in great detail.
Actually today was the first day I managed to attend all four meals - I usually skip breakfast or tea if I am working or sleeping still.
I am yet to properly visit a gym and a sauna. I only played one game of table tennis so far, where I lost miserably. Need to up my game a lot ;))))

And I only located the sauna today. We have limited freshwater supply on the ship, so sauna is not open daily, there is only two days a week I can go - on Saturdays for the expedition day and on Sundays for the women's day. This week I did not have time on either day.
I have been trying to keep on track with my yoga, but I did not find time to do a proper cardio workout at the gym. The only thing that I hope helps me - I ran around up and down the stairs all day long. My cabin is on "-1" deck and my atmospheric office is on the "4.5" deck. We launch balloons from the helo deck on the "2nd" deck and the CTD lab and the mess (cafeteria) are both on the main "0" deck. But I am not sure it is enough and I keep promising myself to go running or rowing every day. Yet it is again closer to midnight and I got up at 7AM and I am exhausted. So all I will most likely do today - take my water sample at midnight and go  to bed.

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...