Quiet foggy day

Last night we had to deploy Argo floats in the dark, so they put a spotlight on the deck, and this light attracted many birds. It was kind of magical, the dark misty night and all the birds flying in the light near the ship. One bird ended up on the deck though, and had problems lifting up. Mark managed to catch him and threw him back in the air. It was an Antarctic Petrel:

This morning we worked hard, as the CTD stations were close together and only about 300 m deep, so they didn't take long. It was very sunny this morning and we passed a HUGE iceberg. It was really enormous! Here are some pictures I took:

The iceberg was surrounded in its own cloud/fog, it was an amazing sight!



I put these panorama shots together, the first one is made up of 8 (!) photos, the second one of 4.

Shortly after, it became foggy and it stayed like that for the rest of the day. What a pity! But it did make it easier for me to go to bed, I slept for about 4 hours in the afternoon. I got up just in time for dinner. Karen wanted to explain something to me, while everybody else was already at dinner. Then the bridge called, and told us to look out of the window at starboard side really quickly - there was a small iceberg with about 5-6 Adelie penguins really close to the ship, an amazing site!!! Too bad there wasn't enough time to grap my camera.

This is my last watch! We already finished all the CTD's, we are now just going back along the line to do some more measurements. Sometime during the night that will be done, we will turn around and from then on, we're on the way home! It doesn't mean that we don't have work to do though - now we need to process all the data and work on the cruise report. I am chosen to work in the "salt mine", this is where we analyze the salinity samples. This work is infamous for being very boring and mind killing, so we'll see how that goes. We'll have training tomorrow. Besides that, I need to work on the bathymetry data. We want to finish the cruise report by Friday.

Ohh, here is the link to the Crew Page that I made with Angelika. It's so nice to walk around the ship and see familiar faces instead of new faces all the time.

That's all, let's hope for a sunny day and more photos tomorrow :)