Krill, icebergs, penguins and... work!

This morning we woke up to a bit bigger waves, cloudy skies and surrounded by icebergs! After breakfast I started my first watch with Angelika (the watch leader) and Nuno. Kurt is also on our watch but I think he was working with his own instrument, I didn't really see him.

The first thing we did was putting all the drifters back inside. The deck was wet, the waves pretty big, the clouds amazing and some ice bergs nearby! I regretted having to work, I wanted to take pictures ;). The rest of the watch was quiet, every hour we have to check that all the instruments are still logging and we took a water sample that will be used to measure salinity. I am responsible for the bathymetry data (depth of the ocean). It's very simple, every day I download the data of the previous day. I played with the data a bit in Matlab, it's quite interesting :)

There was a bucket with krill in the science lab, fascinating creatures! I took some photos. Some people ate the krill!! I don't know why you would want to try that ;) but they said it didn't actually have much taste.




And this is me throwing up... hehe no just kidding, Loïc took this picture of me taking pictures of the krill in the bucket.



The watch finished at 12, which is also lunch time. After lunch I worked a bit more on the bathymetry data, and every now and then I ran out to take photos of ice bergs. It's snowing though and quite windy so it's not very pleasant on the deck - I am scared to be blown overboard ;) At some point a big wave crashed over the ship and I got wet - oops.





At about 14:30 we reached our first station, very exciting! I didn't have anything to do, so I just watched how they let the first CTD in. This is an instrument that you lower down to near the ocean bottom on a cable. On the way, it measures some variables and it also takes water samples at different depths. They also deployed the first drifter at this station! From now on, stations are quite close together so there will be a lot of work to do.



I got distracted by some icebergs... with penguins on them!! That was such an amazing sight, especially how they manage to stay on while big waves go over the iceberg. The shapes of the icebergs are sometimes really fascinating, I took many pictures! Too bad it's such an overcast day. I also forgot to put some gloves on, and had to go back inside cause my hands were seriously freezing off.

This was the first ice berg I saw that had penguins on it.. quite far away though, just look for some black dots ;)



This one was closer, amazing!! I zoomed in to one of my pictures... again I was wishing I did buy a larger zoomlens for this trip!




Now I have to get ready for dinner, and then I will be on another watch from 20:00 till midnight. Not much chances of getting sleep down here! :)

The sea is getting rougher quickly now, let's see how that's going... Anyway, have to run to get changed in time for dinner!