Hi Everyone,
A rather quiet day today, no physical oceanographic work was planned so that the biologists could get time to fish, and it was foggy so not much to see on deck. It was also a little choppy so some people were absent or just trying to keep their eyes on the horizon, so a little quieter really. This meant I really had no excuse for not buckling down and getting some of my primary PhD work done.
Amazingly to me, the internet connection on the ship is just about good enough for some of the remote working that I am so used to doing at home. While a little slow and clunky I was actually able to access some of the modelling supercomputers I use. This involved a connection from the ship via a VPN to a remote desktop and from there a connection to the actual supercomputer. Somehow this all worked just about enough for me to submit some commands, even if I did have to log in hundreds of times! This was gratifying as with the seasickness and the hectic ship life I have been struggling to fit in some writing, modelling and data processing.
Other than this, most of the day was spent with some of the other students, trying to pass the time and socialise. We are getting much better at the crosswords which are published each day on the ship, we only have to cheat a tiny bit on a couple of words now. We also got very involved in something called “Unreal Tournament” which someone had on a portable hard drive. It is a very old multiplayer shooter game, somewhat reminiscent of Doom (or Halo/Call of Duty for more modern viewers). I can’t say I’ll be jumping on the bandwagon any time soon, but we did spend a cathartic hour or so chasing each other around some virtual maps.
Finally, I managed to find some time to process the many photos I have been taking of all the wildlife we see from the ship. The biggest takeaway for me was how terribly bad I am at identifying animals. I thought I had only seen gentoo and chinstrap penguins from the ship yesterday but (as you will have seen from my recent attachments) I apparently also saw some king penguins and macaroni penguins, which at the time I must have thought were gentoos…. This was very exciting as we hadn’t seen many of the macaroni penguins, though it would be nice to see some slightly more convincingly with my own eyes.
With this in mind we have now finished our Western Core Box (WCB) work and are now moving towards some of the bays around South Georgia (likely Rosita and/or Stromness) to calibrate some of the acoustic equipment (and hopefully grab some pictures of the stunning scenery and wildlife).
Can’t wait to see what South Georgia looks like close up!
02/01/23
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