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.