ICE ICE BABY

5pm Friday 29th March

Well my friends I don't really know what to say. Things have been magical.

We are in the sea-ice now...

The past two nights Gwen and I have put on lots of jumpers, hats, scarves, gloves and big padded boiler suits and gone stargazing up on monkey island. The moon has been close to full so actually the sky is a bit too light to see the full milky-way but the stars are clear and bright. Poor Orion is upside down but still looking his magnificent self. I have seen several constellations which could be the Southern Cross.... I am going to get one of the guys from Oz to point out which one it actually is if things are still clear tonight. The full moon lights up the icebergs around us and it is only when we can no longer feel out fingers or noses that we tear ourselves away. Up on monkey island you are far from the engines, and with the ships going slow through the ice it seems really quiet.

During the day there are ICEBERGS and PENGUINS.... and penguins ON icebergs! This morning dawned bright and beautiful and surrounded by broken sea ice and lager icebergs. Apparently the sunrise was spectacular and the clear blue skies and glistening ice was captivating all day. The water around the ship was teeming with shoals of chinstrap penguins. (really must find out the collective noun for penguins!) When they swim they dive out of the water in arcs and the air is filled with their boisterous squawking! Penguins are such endearing creatures. On land they are like little toddlers staggering about the place with their arms out. Then as I have said they are like bullets in the water! We also saw a few solitary seals hanging out on some of the icebergs.

But what completely blew me away today was the inquisitive humpback whale who nosed around the ship for about an hour. Magical moment for me. I was photographing penguins on one side of the ship when Phil from the US came running and shouting about a whale. So I rushed over to the other side and could see nothing. For a full five minutes I stared helplessly at the water convinced that that was it, I had missed my chance, number one on my bucket list would not get ticked today. Then came the huge noise of the whale blow and there he was, back breaching the surface. The water round here is so clear and he was so close to the ship that you could look down and see his full form under the water. Huge, slow and graceful. For the next hour we all just followed him about the ship as he surface every minute or so, sometimes sticking his nose right out of the water to say hello. Honestly I was a bit startstruck. But we all were. Everyone just kept looking at each other and not really saying anything other that 'wow'. Eventually we moved off to the next mooring and I only felt slightly sorry that I had not seen him do the iconic tail flip. But not to worry there was another whale at the next stop who would pop up, hang around for 5 mins or so, then with a massive tail flip disappear for 10 mins before popping back up. I only took a few photos because really I just wanted to enjoy the experience. But I do have a few beauties to show you when I get back.

Today we have also been surrounded by Snowy Petrels (I think) and Giant Petrels. Wonderful birds. This morning as I was on my way up to monkey island a Snowy Petrel landed just a metre away and then studied me quizzically while I took photos.

Obviously there is still lots of work to do, and sampling in this cold while the snow falls is pretty tough. I have a trapped nerve in my back which has been nipping me all day but I am off for a hot shower and a bit of a relax before dinner. I think we will be doing another CTD this evening but I'll wrap up warm and if the moon is out it might be alright!

Honestly my dears I wish you were here with me to see all this. But not to worry I shall bore you silly with stories and photos when I return!

Peace and love x x x x x x x

NB: Fear not dear Emily! On the Falklands the penguins are pretty lucky. They are too small to set off landmines but their beaches are protected from us nasty humans who would set off the mines. Apparently sheep are fine too... though there has been the occasional incident with a cow.....

There are about 23 scientists and technicians on the cruise doing various different things. There is 6 of us looking at the tracer, two groups using what look like a pair of giant yellow toilet brushes to measure the micro-structure of the water column (small eddies and currents), a group of guys looking at a range of hydrographic properties, such as the temperature and salinity, Gwen and a couple others mapping the bathymetry and a few general other folk who muck in. Most people are from BAS or NOCS but Pierre is from a French university and Xinfeng is from MIT. Both have mostly been doing modelling of this type of data and are here really for the experience.

There are roughly 23 crew members who are all really friendly. There are the officers, engineers, stewards and the able-seamen who work on deck with us, operating the CTD winch etc. The ship is pretty old fashioned in that the officers eat with scientists not the crew, and there is a bar for scientists, officers and the engineers... but the rest of the crew have a separate one!

Ice cold in Elephant...

6pm Tuesday 26th March

It is starting to feel much chillier now. While we are sampling our breath clouds in the air and our hands are numb by the end. The water is just over 1 degC now. Brr. Freezing fog again today and big seas and high winds forecast. Again. However I understand that things are pretty nasty in the UK weather-wise? So don't think for a second that I am complaining! I would rather have the opportunity to see ice-bergs than turn into one just trying to get to work in the morning!

I finished my shift today with a bastard of a headache and monster back pain. Luckily there is easy access to drugs on the ship. And one big bonus of a shared room is that there is plenty of floor space to do back stretches! The lights in the container are those nasty strip lighting that strobe at a very high frequency so the headache is not big surprise. Ben has been getting them loads as on the nightshift there is no daylight to dilute the effect. We had a CTD just after breakfast at the start of my shift which we ran through the machine* and still had a couple of hours spare. So it was back to long calibrations. Andy has the dreaded man-flu (or a wee sniffle as I would say) so I sent him off, put on some music and read my kindle. All you have to remember is to top up the liquid nitrogen every 20 mins or so and write up the results every now and then. So not too bad! Would have preferred a nice armchair to the lab stool but you can't have it all! And of course bang on the end of my shift was another CTD so I didn't really finish till an hour later. I think there is another around 9pm so its going to feel like a long day today.

While we were sampling there was a flock (? Group? Squad? Gaggle?) of chinstrap penguins doing beautiful synchronised swimming by the ship. They are lovely wee things. That make one hell of a noise! They have this really loud squawk that you think must be coming from a bird 10 times the size! This only slightly puts me off wanting one as a pet! I have been informed that the whale blows I saw earlier could be from a blue whale as the blow was straight up and hung in the air for ages. Or something like that anyway! Hopefully once we are near the sea ice we will see more than just whale blows!

* Oh how dreadfully rude of me not to introduce you earlier! Our wonderful contraption is named Electric Barbarella 3000. Honestly I don't know why... other than Marie-Jo wanted to give her a nice French name so Steve gave her a ridiculous one before she had the chance!

6pm Wednesday 27th March

We finished the Drake Passage section in the night and are steaming east towards the sea-ice and moorings. We have been steaming all day and should get to the moorings tomorrow. So other than run the last few stations we don't have much to do! So the next 10 days or so are scheduled for mooring recovery with only the occasional CTD so there will be much less work to do. I might actually have the time to read one or two of the 100 papers I brought!

At 6am we passed Elephant Isle! Unfortunately I was still tucked up in bed but when I got up an hour later there were still islands looming out of the ocean. And ICEBERGS!!!!! There was a huge tabular one in the distance and a sculptural jaggy one a bit closer. Beautiful. In the ocean around us there were small chunks of ice (maybe car-sized!) streaming past us. Paul (the moorings guy) and I ran up to get the best view... but it was mental cold so we didn't quite make it up to monkey island! We left the ice behind us during the morning but happily we are headed towards more!

Today has been mostly overcast but the sun is streaming down now. The ocean has been a steely grey all day with sharp white streaks where the waves break. But when the sun shines down the entire ocean turns into liquid mercury. Dark and shining. I really thought I would get tired of the endless ocean, but it is constantly changing and I can still get lost looking out the window. The waves have been pretty big today. When they break over the ship they are a clear turquoise that you expect from much warmer waters.

We seem to have left our rag-tag following of albatrosses behind in the deep ocean but they have been replaced by a cloud of Petrels. I think they are Cape Petrels (according to the book given to me by a friendly ornithologist - thanks Andy!) they are lovely wee patchy black and white birds.

I just nipped outside to watch the sun set. Glorious! It has been overcast most afternoons so this is the first beautiful sunset I have seen this trip. I got a couple of nice photos of the sunset with the petrels flying in front. Lovely. I am also hoping the the skies remain clear and I might get to see some stars tonight. I had been really looking forward to seeing southern stars but have yet to see one! 

Missing your beautiful faces! Is all well with you? x x x x x

Tharr she blows!

6pm Sunday 24th March

Yes indeed. Thar she blows! Over the last few days I have seen lots of whale blows, though I have yet to see one breach. I am still oohing and aahing each time! When I was little I had a book about a wee boy who wakes up very early one morning to find a whale has beached and he goes on a whole adventure to get the whale get back out to sea. Anyway the final page had the whale out at sea and written in the whale blow was 'there she blows'. Or something like that anyway! So thats one dream from when I was a wee nipper fulfilled! Fingers crossed I will see one breach! Also today I saw a group of chin-strap penguins swimming by the boat. They are super cute and much smaller than the kings. They were jumping right up out of the water like dolphins!

So the storm. Well yeah it was pretty rough. Poor Gwen was pretty ill with it but luckily I have not felt seasick at all! (touch wood!) Mostly the weather made working much harder. It was dangerous to be out on deck so we had to keep our samples in a cool room inside. So to get the samples I have to go through two incredibly heavy doors, a watertight door, a huge freezer door and over lots of metal steps... carrying coolboxes with two 2 litre glass bottles full of seawater. While the ship is rolling like crazy. Good god my back is so painful! So it was picking up during my shift on Friday but it got really bad during the night. Ben and Steve are on the night shift in the container. At 3am a big wave came right over the container and in the air vents at the top, flooding the lab floor! They grabbed the laptops and made a run for it! Luckily they were fine and no damage was done. When we came in the next morning there was still an inch or so sloshing about on the container floor. So half my shift was mopping up! But the equipment was all fine! Phew!

We were 'hove-to' (anchored nose into the swell) for about 12 hours during the bad weather (and there is more forecast for Tuesday!) but we made up time today collecting a mooring which took less time than scheduled. So a South Georgia visit is not completely off the table! Sleeping is pretty tough in the really bad weather. There are curtains above my bed and at times they must be hanging horizontally above me! Not fallen out of bed yet though! (again touch wood)

Today we finally caught up with the backlog of samples... but no rest for the wicked. We started a long calibration of the machine. And I just cannot emphasise the long part of that enough! We have another CTD at about 9pm tonight. Sigh.

I had a wee tour of the bridge this afternoon with Ben and Xinfeng (a phd student from MIT) which was pretty cool! The ship is about 30 years old so some of the equipment looks pretty old school. Some amazing stuff though! And incredible views! What really blew me away was that they still use paper charts. They have big beautiful charts and in pencil plot the course. And they have 100s of these charts at varying scale. Most of the tech looks like retro arcade games, albeit painted uniform blue rather than being covered in space ships or what ever. So in amongst all this high tech stuff is the ships wheel. Which is tiny! And not even a full wheel but more like one of those half ones that race cars have. Very disappointing. So (of course) when I commented on it size the first officer immediately responded that its what you do with it that counts!

Hope life in the UK is treating you all well!

Peace x x x x

P.S. Jan is keeping a kind of 'official' blog for the cruise, and he has much more free time than me so has been putting up photos etc. If you want to check it out its dimesuk4.blogspot.co.uk.

The calm before the storm...

5pm Thursday 21st March

Just come off shift, and for the first time there was not a CTD just before so I actually got off on time! (the only down side is that the next CTD will be late this evening so it will be an even later night for me tonight) I just went up to monkey island (the very top of the ship) and spent a bit of time enjoying the sunshine. I sat next to the captain at lunch today (!) and he described this as the calm before the storm. Oh dear. The captain is a nice, fairly quiet and unassuming character. His napkin ring says 'Master'. The first officer is everything you could hope for in an English sailor/officer type. He has the accent, mannerisms and black beard to go with it all! The ships doctor has the most incredibly posh English accent I have ever encountered! He is really nice guy though and happy to help out! I took pity on him having nothing to do so trained him up to help with the sampling! :D

While I was up on monkey island I really wanted to photo an albatross... however they were all being shy so no luck! When I am busy they are bloody everywhere but as soon as my camera is handy.... Nada.

The big headline today is MORE PENGUINS! While we were sampling there was a group of 4 king penguins frolicking around in the water by the ship! I didn't have my camera on me so no photos I am afraid. Really beautiful, fast and graceful creatures. They look really sleek and vivacious in the sea.... not like these chubby, waddely things you see on land!

I am covered in bruises! Hands and knees in particular. Clearly I am not used to real hard work. I also have weirdly sore muscles in my hands from carrying the sample bottles... they at least are going to be strong by the end of this! The food has been pretty good actually so despite the bumps I am feeling fairly healthy. I am actually quite lucky to be coeliac on the ship... otherwise all the three course meals and huge helpings would be flooring me!

Its a really nice bunch of people I am working with. When we sample its usually me with a clipboard bossing folk about, Brian a technician from the US who has been doing this kinda thing for over 30 years so is great to work with, two young guys from Tazmania who oparate the CTD, an engineer with BAS called Paul, Pierre from France who was taught english by a Scot and says number like a real highlander and whoever else is to hand. Its early days but we are still all managing to have a laugh with it!

The waves are starting to pick up now...

Miss you. Love you. X x x x

NB. If I have not already mentioned this on the left is a link to the ships webcam and from that page you can follow a link to info like the ships track and see where about in the sea I am!

Egret regrets.

7pm Wednesday 20th, station 11 South of the Falklands

Well hello again! Things have been super busy. As we came down the continental slope we had lots of sampling stations really close together so we still have a huge backlog of samples to run through and are still collecting more. The CTD has a rosette of 24 big bottles which get opened at different depths to collect samples. When it gets up on deck we need to fill up big 2 L glass bottles from the CTD (there is a rather lengthy technique to avoid any contamination). This whole process takes a while and involves kneeling in freezing water on the deck and having freezing cold water running over your hands for a while. So I have some rather fetching X4s which are big orange padded dungarees and coat. Plus my fur lined steel toe-cap wellies and bright yellow hard hat and I am basically the height of fashion!

So at each station we take samples from each of the bottles on the CTD and then several duplicates. We put the samples into big cool boxes filled with cold water and ice packs. We then have to move the cool boxes to another part of the deck and strap them down and take empty sample bottles back to the CTD area. We then run as many of the samples through the machine as we can before the next station. Running samples is fairly similar to what I described earlier with all the computers but you have to change bottles round, press valves at key moments and top up the liquid nitrogen. Luckily the computer makes silly noises when you have to do these things ('woof-woof' means change the sample)! But it takes a lot of concentration. I seriously hate having to do the liquid nitrogen. Pouring it from a big urn into a little trap on a moving ship is horrible, and then when you need to top up the urn it involves crossing the deck climbing over some barriers and through a couple of doors.... when you need two hands for the nitrogen and the ship is rolling.... totally shit. But no accidents yet! :P

I getting on well being on shift with Andy.... though I am even more convinced about what a 'big-picture' guy he is! He keeps forgetting the little details.... which can be pretty nerve wrecking because if you miss key stages everything might go boom! So mostly I run the machine and the sampling and let him get on with data analysis and being an important professor! Poor Ben is on the midnight to 8am shift. He has not managed to figure out his sleeping pattern yet and was a total mess when I came in this morning! But we usually manage to have a cuppa in the evening and the occasional game of darts (I think I am not actually much worse despite the heaving deck!). Unlike Andy most bigwigs stop coming on cruises as soon as they can so it is a pretty young crowd on this ship so no one is too jaded yet! Its quite social and chilled on the ship which is really nice.


The sea is rougher now. It has been really foggy today which has disrupted some of the other science done aboard. I think people have found it pretty frustrating just sitting around. There is a fair swell at the moment... and a swell of 10 meters forecast for tomorrow evening!!!! And Saturady is meant to be worse. Eeep! Luckily I am not feeling at all sick (well beyond the usual coeliac background) Gwen is feeling it a bit but no one is really too bad. Which is great! Fingers crossed it lasts through the bad weather! If it is like that then we probably won't be able to sample... but we won't be able to sleep either! I slept pretty badly last night. I kept trying to sleep on my side and then tumbling over as the ship rolled and waking up! I'll get used to sleeping on back soon though! And I have made sure nothing is loose in any of the drawers so we are not kept up with things rattling about the place!


What has been breaking my heart is that there is a wee flock of snowy egrets (though without the tuft?) which are following the ship. They turned up yesterday and must have been lost. They seem to be really struggling flying by the ship in the day and roosting on the deck at night. They are absolutely beautiful birds. It is heartbreaking because they will all die soon without fresh water etc. Apparently the local birds mob them too. Which seems unfair since the albatrosses/ shearwaters following the ship are sooooooo much bigger! Still amazed by that!

So I had better go as there is CTD coming up now. Although I am on ship between 8am-4pm I help out if there is a CTD any time I am awake. But usually I go for being the clipboard person and oversee rather than actually getting too chilled.


Written 10.30pm

Just finfished the aforementioned CTD. It took a while but I quite like doing them at night as everything seems quiter and calmer. The swell was coming right up by the deck in big walls, and with all the lights on deck for sampling it looks like thick blue paint. Its not breaking over the side but sometimes it looks like a vertical wall above you. Pretty scary. But also amazing.

The poor wee egrets were all flying around in the lights desparetly trying to land somewhere and soon getting blown off. For a while they were all on top of the container lab. Unfortunately my camera was not to hand as it would have made a great photo! They are very beautiful in flight and all ruffled and hunched when perched. They have silly long legs that kind of wave about when they fly. Completely the wrong shape for here. Going to be really sad when they are gone.

One thing that is pretty rubbish about a late station is that I am now pretty wired from being on deck and lugging things about. But got to be up early so need to sleep. So I had better go and try!

Love to you all! x x x x x x x

The difficult second post.

Glossary :P BAS - British Antarctic Survey, NOCS - National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, JCR - RRS James Clark Ross, CTD - the instrument we put over the side of the ship to collect water samples from various depths

Written Sunday 17th at 9am, at dock in Stanley.

So your anticipation must be at fever pitch. I can picture you sitting at you computer desperately refreshing this page, tear of frustration gathering in your eyes as you eagerly await an update from me.... Well finally your patience and dedication has paid off.

Well the journey was pretty rubbish. I left Norwich at 11am on Thursday morning and got a taxi with Andy (my supervisor) to BAS in Cambridge. We got there an hour before the next transport on to Heathrow so had a bit of time of a cuppa etc. The minibus from BAS got us to Heathrow at 3pm... our flight was at 8.45pm. Nice. There was twelve of us heading to the ship this route so the long hours at the airport were spent getting to know people.

From Heathrow it was an epic long flight to Sao Paulo. There was pretty limited legroom and (of course) despite it saying it clearly on the booking info the airline had NO IDEA I am coeliac/vegi. Awesome. So three salads and two fruit salads it was. Luckily I had brought stuff with for this eventuality so didn't go too hungry! It was then a couple of hours wait in Sao Paulo. We saw an absolutely beautiful sunrise so hopefully someday I will get back to Brazil and see more than just the airport!

The next flight was to Santiago. This was shorter and more generous with the legroom so felt like luxury! By this stage I had thourghly lost track of what time it was or even what day. When we arrived in Santiago it was about 11am on Friday their time. Several times prior to the flight and at check-in we got told that we would have to collect our bags at Santiago as it was a long stop-over. But when we got to baggage reclaim we were informed that our luggage was checked all the way to the Falklands.  Luckily no one had been smart enough to put a change of clothes in our hand luggage so we were all equally ripe for the rest of the journey! What was actually most frustrating was that I was wearing warm, dark clothing... which was not ideal for the 27 degC heat of Santiago! However I was better of than Ben who was wearing thermal long-johns instead of underwear!

Santiago was amazing! Its a big dusty city surrounded by the stunning scenery of the Andes. We were staying in a Holiday Inn at the airport... which was still under construction! But actually the rooms were really nice. I was sharing with Gwen who is a data manger at BAS (She is the third woman on the ship along with Marie-Jose another of my supervisors... So we are fairly outnumbered!). We dropped off our stuff and got the bus into the city for some food and a wee explore. (apart from Brian from NOCS who decided to stay in the hotel and do some more programming despite doing that for all the flights rather than sleeping/watching movies. Anyone who would rather write code that explore Santiago in the sun has to be a bit unbalanced in my book!). Getting the bus from the airport we got quite a bit of hassle from taxi drivers which didn't give me high hopes for Santiago... but actually it was such a friendly chilled city! I felt really safe and we after the airport our blindingly pasty skin didn't attract any comment! We had lunch in a market in the old town (apparently the seafood was incredible) and had a little wander around the streets. Then we stopped for some pretty incredible iced coffees and climbed a wee fortified hill with stunning views over the city. One of our group had a friend based in the city so we got the underground out to a restaurant she recommended. The underground was cleaner, faster and considerably nicer than anything we have in the UK. After a couple of Pisco Sours I had a mind-blowing dinner of this really strong baked cheese with mushrooms (Provelato? Can't really remember the spelling) Anyway it nearly put me in a cheese induced coma. But in a good way. Chile is now very high on my list of places to visit. I would love to go back and explore more. And eat more.

The next morning it was up at 5am to catch the next flight. This one was to Punta Arenas in Southern Chile. Again the plane was pretty decent and the flight not too ridiculously long.... but we were all pretty fed up of travelling and seriously longing for a change of clothes! We only had an hour in Punta which was mostly just to go through immigration and a welcome stretch for the legs! The flight on to the Falklands was not too long either and then we were almost there!

The Falkland Islands are a lot like Lewis... but with worse roads and more minefields. From the airport it is an hour to Port Stanley on the bumpiest roughest road. We got to the JCR at about 4pm on Saturday. When we got on I was pretty gutted to discover I'll be sharing a cabin with Gwen for the cruise. Gwen is lovely and we are on the same shifts but we all know I like my personal space! Our cabin is pretty big though. Its a four berth cabin (but with the top bunks stowed away) with an ensuite shower room. Another hiccup was that, despite lots of communication from my end about my coeliacs, and despite all the assurances from BAS.... The ship had not been told anything. The cooks were nice about it though and later this afternoon we are going to head into Stanley and see if we can find any gluten-free past/flour etc. They do have plolenta/rice/potatoes etc so I am not too worried. Just pretty annoyed with BAS!

But complaining over! The ship has a really nice atmosphere. Its huge and an absolute maze but I am already getting to know the important routes, like how to get from my cabin to the dining room, and where the officers and scientist saloon is! Haha! The ship is pretty old school. Its table service at meals, formal clothes for dinner, personal napkins and napkin-rings, and big portraits of the Queen and Philip in the dining room! Some of the decks are even wooden!

Written Monday 18th 5pm, steaming South from Stanley to to the test station.

So I am just off shift and have a bit of time before I need to get back for more training. My shift is 8am – 4pm with another 4hours kind of 'on call' to help with sampling etc. Today is a bit rubbish because I had my shift (will explain what I do in a bit) then later this afternoon I need to get trained on running seawater samples, then around 10pm I need to get trained as we do the first CTD cast at the test station. So it will be a long day. It does not help that I am feeling pretty sick, not seasick (yet!) as I haven't been great all day and we only started sailing late morning. So probably the old gluten story again. Hopefully that was due to dinner in Stanley last night not anything on the ship!

From my cabin you can hear the chirrup of the SWATH bathymetry thingy that maps the sea floor, but mostly the ship is not too loud, just a bit creaky and crashy. There is a bit of a swell but apparently this is about as flat as it gets. This morning was gloriously sunny as well, though its a bit more overcast now. I found out this morning that the sea-ice is really advanced this year and that we might have to do a bit of ice-breaking! Really hoping we get to do that!

So yesterday we were still in Stanley. It was sunny and windy and fairly Lewisian. In the morning we went on a gluten-free hunt in the two shops in Stanley. Managed to get some bread-mix, plain flour, rice noodles and some stock. So pretty chuffed! Stanley is pretty quirky. The houses are cute wooden ones and have brightly coloured roofs. And there are Union Jacks bloody everywhere!! Everyone drives big Land Rovers, each with a minimum of four flags attached to the roof/wing mirrors etc!

In the afternoon I walked out to Gypsy Cove with Gwen, Andy and Ben. It was quite a nice walk in the sun, past some impressive wrecks and some stunning beaches. The beaches were glorious white expanses with crystal water... and lots of barbed wire to make sure you don't walk on them as landmines could wash up! :S Anyway Gypsy Cove meant PENGUINS!! Hooray!! They were super cute ones. I don't have much internet so I'll let you google the proper name but it begins with an M and they are the little ones that live in burrows in the hill! The first one I saw was just peaking out from his hole looking all sleepy and adorable! I only saw about 10 in total as they were mostly out to sea fishing, but I could have stayed for hours watching them waddle about the place! Like rockets in the water but on land they just look so comic!

We went out for dinner at the Malvinas restaurant which was really nice. While most people were going crazy for the Falkland lamb, I tucked into creamed spinach and spiced cabbage and a few other tasty side dishes! If you are ever in this neck of the woods I would highly recommend it!

I started shift at 8am after a nice breakfast (even at breakfast it is white table cloths, silver napkin rings, table service, several courses and options...) I will try and post some photos soon of what the lab looks like. Some of the other groups came to have a look and it was described as 'What Hollywood would build if asked for a crazy science lab'. Most of what I did today involved filling some details in one laptop, getting some numbers out and writing them down on my sheet, then going to a computer and integrating the graphs it spits out and writing some more numbers down on my sheet, then going to a second laptop and checking the numbers on my sheet against the numbers on the screen. Rinse and repeat. It will get more complex than this but probably not less tedious.

We had a safety drill once the ship left Stanley. We had to muster in the bar, get on our life vests (luckily not the immersion suits!) and get into the lifeboat. I really hate wearing life vest as they really constrict your chest and make me all claustrophobic. But actually the drill was straightforward and quick and lifeboats are considerably less horrible than the rafts during the sea survival training. Luckily the drill finished in time to watch the dolphins as we left the Falklands. Obviously living on Lewis I am almost bored of seeing dolphins... :P But really they were fantastic!

I haven't had much time for bird-watching but the few I have seen are just all bloody massive! They just seem to be on a completely different scale here. And I keep getting told to remember they are always further away than you think as well!

Things are going to be pretty full on from now on. We are heading South from the Falklands to do a transect of Drake Passage and the CDT casts (when we put the instrument over to collect samples) are only going to be separated by ~20 mins of steaming. It takes considerably longer to run the samples so it looks like we are going to have a major backlog from day 1!

I'll try and update more frequently now that things should be more settled into a routine (and once I have figured out emails/internet here – the computer guy arrived just before we set off as he was on a ship back from South Georgia so has not briefed us yet). Hope life is treating y'all good in my absence!

Peace and love x x x x x

So...What?

I know, I know. Me? A blog?! Not likely. But yet here I am. A little horrified with myself but nevertheless here it goes. My first post.

I am going to be at sea for 6 weeks onboard the RRS James Clark Ross in Drake Passage and the Scotia Sea. I head off on the 14th March, with a quick stopover in Santiago, then onto the Falkland Islands to catch the ship. I will be back in the UK on the 1st of May (so get out the bunting). I really really hope that I will get to see whales from the ship and I should see some penguins while on the Falklands! Eeep!

So why am I going? My PhD is part of the ongoing DIMES project, (Diapycnal and Isopycnal Mixing Experiment in the Southern Ocean), which aims to observe and measure diapycnal mixing. Diapycnal mixing occurs vertically in the water column, across density surfaces known as isopycnals. Our theory is that diapycnal mixing is enhanced over regions with rough ocean floor, such as Drake Passage. To this end in 2009 78 kg of a chemical tracer (triflouromethyl sulfur pentaflouride, CF3SF5) was released into the ocean on the Pacific side of Drake Passage. Since then its dispersion vertically (diapycnal mixing) and horizontally (isopycnal mixing) has been tracked by cruises such as this one.  Water is collected at different depths along the path towards the Atlantic and its tracer content is measured. So while at sea we will be collecting lots of water samples and running them through a machine to measure the tracer content. This means long shifts in the tracer lab... which is in a cargo container on the deck of the ship. This blog will not be science heavy but if there is anything you want to know just say!

So what is the purpose if this blog? It is simple. I will miss you and want to keep in touch. We all know I am dreadful at keeping in touch beyond the occasional letter or postcard (hard to send from a ship...) so rather than sending out lots of sporadic emails I figure a blog could be a good way to keep y'all updated.

I will be working long shifts in a lab inside a cargo container... so this might not always be the most thrilling of tales! But it is always the possibility that I will go absolutely bloody bonkers and having this contact with you might just stem the tides of madness.