First day on the ship

I slept really well, as I always do on ships :) A bit too short though, I stayed up too late (till 1 AM) and we had to get up at 7:00 as breakfast is at 7:30!! Too early!

It was a really sunny day, so after breakfast we headed to the upper deck to enjoy the sunshine, the view and even a couple of whales in the distance. There definately are worse places to be :)
Karen and Andy were one deck below us, see the photo. Karen is the PI (Principal Investigator) on this cruise, basically the boss ;) And Andy is her postdoc.



They unpacked all the drifters (we have 40 of them!) and layed them out on the deck. This is what they look like:



Pat and I went there to see if we could help, but we couldn't really do anything so we just sat in the sun and enjoyed the view... not bad ;) The orange jackets are so bright I need to wear my sunglasses or I am blinded by my own jacket!! They also made us wear the helmet, so we look very professional but we were not actually doing anything special.



I thought it would be interesting to show you what the ship looks like. This is the room that I'm sharing with Angelika. My bed is the messy one near the door ;)



This is the room where everybody is working, well at least the people working on computers. The part that you can see in the photo on the right is really nice with big windows!



Adrian made a weather forecast, we're going to have storm tomorrow, but hopefully it will pass quickly.



There was not much work to do for those who weren't preparing their instruments, so Pat and I enjoyed some sunshine on the upper deck. It got quite windy and cold though! I had to put my hoody up because my hair was blowing in my face all the time, and Pat took this nice picture of me :)

In the afternoon we had a fire drill! We were told it was a major incident, there were 4 casualties. We had to take our life jackets and survival suits from our cabins, and meet at the muster point (in the bar). To build a hospital in the bar, people with first aid experience had to stay, while the others were told to wait in the saloon. Some had to volunteer to carry casualties to the hospital. Because the fire got out of control, we were told to abandon ship. This means putting your life jacket on and get into the life boat. The life boats are self righting, which means they turn themselves around when they capsize. To make this work, you have to strap yourself in.




Pat does look a bit too happy for someone who has to abandon ship, but hey :) Fortunately it was all just an excercise!

We saw an albatross today! It was the biggest one there is (I forgot the name, oops) and it was following the ship for a long time. Very impressive, it is huge but so elegant, just gliding along. I tried to take some photos, here are some zooms of the photos I took. I'm sorry for the quality, I wish I had a better lens!



We also saw a very pretty sunset and moonrise... And now I have to go to bed, as I really need to get some sleep, and I will be working on my first watch tomorrow from 8 AM till noon.

PS I wrote the cruise diary for today with Angelika... and she decided to put a picture of me as picture of the day!