Greets all - so it's been quite some time since I last wrote anything. Things here on board the LMG have been quite busy, with work and all that. There is a bunch of stuff going on. Actually, we've been mentioned in the news quite a bit in the past few days... check out the threads here.http://voices.washingtonpost.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/
http://pal.lternet.edu/
Things on my end have been quite hectic, but livable. It's just been kind of busy, but that's kind of what I expected. Let's see - where did I leave off... it was pretty early on in the cruise when I sent my last email, so I'll try and update everything all at once.
We dropped our bird people off at Avian island, an Antarctic Conservation Act protected island earlier last week - they will be staying there for 5 days on their own doing a "penguin and other bird census." However, this year, I was able to get onto the island, as the "shack" that they live in during their time away from the ship was in a state of disrepair. All of us (Raytheon folks) got off the boat and took a zodiac in and a bunch of supplies to repair the shack. As you may recall, Avian island was something that I really complained a lot about last year (the smell!). It is a penguin rookery - mostly Adelie penguins live there and hatch their young, so literally thousands upon thousands of penguins... and the net result is you have thousands and thousands of penguins relieving themselves everywhere. The smell is a bit overwhelming, but we had work to do. As we were cruising in, there were several elephant seals (MASSIVE!!!) there and we ended up seeing 2 leopard seals just hanging out - it must be like some kind of all you can eat buffet for the leopard seals! The picture is of me standing in front of one of the many nesting sites on the island. We spent a lot of time working on the shack and getting it ready, so that was pretty cool. After we finished all of our work, we took a small, quick tour of the immediate surroundings of the shack - very cool - I'll send additional pictures at a later time. After the work at Avian, we shuttled some folks around the island and took them on a quick tour around. I ended up getting to drive my first zodiac at that time - yeah, doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's kind of cool to be running around with a 40 HP motor in a inflatable boat in Antarctica. I ended up getting back to the ship around 8:00 PM that night and when I finally got off shift at midnight, I was totally spent (we started our day at 7:15 AM).
Shortly after leaving Avian, we ended up back on the normal LTER schedule, which makes it feel like groundhog day - every day the same :) However, we have been really lucky this year with some of the krill swarms everywhere - we have literally been treated to humpback whale central. There have been pods upon pods of humpback whales in a feeding frenzy that have been simply surrounding the Gould. We have spent several hours sitting still watching the whales just have a blast eating all the krill they can. We've seen some of them fluke (tails in the air), slap (fins slapping the water), spy hop (coming vertically out of the water), and all sorts of other acrobatics. It's been really cool - I'll get some pictures of the humpbacks out later on.
Not really a whole lot of news otherwise - just busy with work and the normal. Oh - before I forget! I'll be staying at Palmer Station at the end of this cruise! Actually, it's a lot stranger than it seems. With all of the cruise schedules being messed up, they had overbooked the Gould and needed just one extra spot on board for the next trip. Since I'm doing both trips, it just made a lot of sense for me to stay at Palmer Station for the interim and just wait to be picked up by the short boat when it came back down. Really cool for me. I'll be at Palmer for 17 days at the end of this trip - 2 Feb - 19 Feb, which is fine by me! It's just a different atmosphere without the boat being there. Okay - I need to get out of here - drop me a line whenever!
VS
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