Hi Everyone,
Apologies for the somewhat melodramatic title, the science and everyone are ok. Today was the day that we ceased working on the science and began our sprint south to avoid the storm. We will be running all the way to our most southerly point, which will be around 63S, where will then recommence science on the A23 section but this time working our way north. Hopefully this means we will miss the 10m waves! The work stopped with a final CTD and BONGO net before lunch (and before my shift) so I actually had no work at all today. I decided to have the day off and relax as we hadn’t had a full day off for a while and the A23 section promises to be quite busy.
A highlight of our journey was that as we went south we began to see some occasional ice in the water, which is very cool, and difficult to photograph. We saw a huge iceberg at least a mile or two in diameter and rising majestically out of the sea not too far from our ship. It was incredibly cool and insane to think that there are hundreds of similarly sized icebergs floating around the Southern Ocean. After this introduction we began to see lots of small icebergs of various shapes and sizes in the water around the ship. These passed every few hours and I have been reliably informed they should be referred to as “bergy bits” (I honestly thought this was just a cute name someone made up, which it probably was once).
The rest of the day was spent relaxing with friends. I rediscovered my Disney music book which I had brought to play on the piano and later in the evening I had another jam session with Chris. This time I had managed to rename all of the tabs on my phone so that we no longer had to play “tab roulette” and could pick classics like “Hey there Delilah” and “Wonderwall”. At another point in the day we had a mini tournament of 2v2 table football, as well as some individual games. Despite (or because of) the roll of the ship, there were some memorable games and we all had great fun. The best game of course was my 10-0 thrashing of Pip, who accepted her defeat very graciously. Finally, I ended the day with some attempts on Mike’s cryptic crossword, though I only managed a couple of clues on my own and had to be guided through the rest. On that note, for anyone interested, the answer to yesterday’s crossword clue was “lotus”. Hope you’re all having a good start to the week!
09/01/23
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