Things that go bump in the night....

6pm Wednesday 3rd April

Well sorry chaps, its been a while!

Today is our last day in amongst the ice. I am going to be pretty gutted tomorrow to wake up and just sea the ocean out my window rather than the stunning ice sculptures of the past few days. There have been lots of moorings recovered and redeployed and poor Paul has been working night and day! Warm in our container we look out at them working on deck in the worsening conditions and even after 8 hours of tedious calibrations we feel pretty lucky!

We have actually been fairly busy. Since the moorings cannot be deployed at night there have been  lots of CTDs and we have been running the samples in the day.  We don't find any of our tracer in this region (and didn't expect to) so have been taking lots of samples for CFC measurements. We are most interested in SF6 and F12 because we can plot the ratio of these to produce a fairly accurate record of water age.  We have also been trying to improve Barbarella by changing the shape of the trap that gets lowered into the liquid nitrogen to trap the gas we sparge (bubble) out of the seawater. However after a long day of calibrations we concluded that the new trap was in fact worse. And now we cannot find the old trap anywhere! Marie-Jo put it somewhere safe..... so safe she can't remember where! (note – trap was found... turns out the problem was that the trap had been carefully labelled and put in the drawer marked 'traps'.... so obviously no one expected to find it there!)

The wind has been very strong the past couple of days. The ice floes stabilise the water around so the ship is fairly still with only the occasional lurch and judder as we go over a particularly large lump of ice. In my cabin you can hear lots of banging as chunks of ice hit the ship. It has been grey and snowy and a little dreich. The first few days in the ice were stunning. Bright, clear and bloody freezing. A couple of days the air temp was minus 10 (out of the wind) and everything was freezing on deck. Including the ships anemometer! The sea around us and in between the bergs turned into a giant slush-puppy.  But today things have been pretty wet and (relatively) mild. We appear to have left the penguins behind us with the nice weather and have only the occasional seal or distant whale for company. The sky is still filled with petrels; cape petrels, snow petrels and giant petrels. The giant petrels are huge prehistoric looking birds that seem to move in lazy slow motion.

The plan is to navigate out of the ice during the night and then steam south-east towards the start of the next section.  So fingers crossed I should have a little time off! There was an announcement earlier to say that tonight we will be leaving the ice floes and heading back out to the open ocean. We were warned to 'batten down the hatches' as it were and reminded that we are on a ship. There has been very little in the way of rocking and rolling while in the ice. So I have got out of 'ship' habits. These are key things like only filling a mug of tea half full, or holding onto the rail while washing your hair, and  not putting things down on surfaces and expecting them to still be there a moment later.

As I write there have been some enormous crashes and jumps and scrapings. The huge shudders and bangs in the ice at night can be pretty alarming actually.

Anyway enough about me. What news from the western front? Has spring sprung yet? How are you? Is life falling apart without me?!

Love love love x x x x

As Tahmeena said if you check out the dimesuk4 blog you will see a rather awesome photo of me in a grey coat leaning over to photo the whale, which is massive in the water next to me! You can also read all about the excitement from the morning of April the first......