Ice & cups

Hello!

Last night was a very rough night. In the end, the captain decided it was unsafe to continue and changed our track in a direction that was safer. I was exhausted by the end of my watch but couldn't fall asleep for a while.

We woke up to calmer seas, though still quite windy. We had to wait for the captain to wake up, so we could turn around and go back to the track where we were before. The drifters are deployed in a straight line, that's why. It took 3 hours to get back. This is how I tie my laptop down when I have to be away from it for a while - I don't want it flying around the room!

The sea is still quite rough and the spray of the waves that crash over the decks has frozen. It looks pretty all covered in a layer of ice, but you have to be careful when you're out on the deck. I helped deploying some drifters today, it was very windy and the deck was slippery.

I went to the bridge cause I had to make a confession... I bumped into the phone in the room where we work, and kind of broke it. I bump into everything with these waves ;) Anyway, it was nice to see the bridge, it's so big and has a nice view. I took a picture of the ice covered ship from there.

We deployed nearly all of the drifters now, only a couple left. When that is done, we will turn around and go back along the same track, this time using the CTD, an instrument that is lowered down to the ocean bottom. We are expecting the first station at 5 AM in the morning, this is the deepest one at 4000m. So everybody was preparing the polystyrene cups that we are sending down - more on that later. When I walked around with the cups from my school kids, I ran into Hamish, the purser (if I got that right, I am still not used to ship-language and I still go to my ROOM instead of my CABIN ;) ) He told me to follow him, and he gave me the official stamp of the ship to put on all my cups. That was really nice! It wasn't until later that I discovered that there is a spelling mistake in their official stamp - it says Antartica instead of AntarCtica. I wonder if he knows!! Anyway, here are some photos of my cup. In the last one they are in a tight cause that's how they go down to the ocean bottom.

Another thing I worked on today is the People Page of the cruise website. Instead of a long list of names and email addresses, it is now a photo board. Even Shackleton has a place on it ;) I also wrote the diary for today as the people I asked to do it told me at 22:00 that they didn't have time... oh well, it gave me something to do during my watch.

That's all for now! I want to get some sleep... I don't think I can be bothered to get up at 5 AM for the CTD, there will be many more stations to come and I think my cups will still look cool if they go down to 3000m instead of 4000m. I need my sleep ;)