Hi Everyone,
Today has been quite a long day despite being quite short, lots of little jobs, but we got through them eventually. We did get some highlights though!
Thanks to everyone’s efforts with the moorings and the buoyancy we managed to finish the moorings in record time and get everything done by yesterday evening, which meant we could set off for new places last night. We have reached the end of our planned cruise activities so everything from now on is a bonus. The two suggested activities that we are going for are krill fishing (as we didn’t get quite as much as we would have liked around South Georgia) and doing some sampling around the A76a iceberg, more on that later.
We started with the krill fishing and that is where we were travelling to. As we had been doing the moorings in Orkney passage we decided that the optimal location to go looking for krill was around the shelf break north of the South Orkney islands, which meant we had some distant views of the islands as we approached, the first land we had seen in a while. We aimed for a few canyons and ridges in the shelf break which were
known to have high krill populations. Unfortunately, four fishing boats had beaten us to the first one, turns out we were not the only ones to know where the krill were and be interested. Although there were two boats in the vicinity of the second one we managed to get to the canyons and catch a good number of krill. This made for some very happy and enthusiastic krill scientists!
Another highlight of the day for me was getting the chance to steer the ship. Although my target was just to maintain a heading of 260 degrees this was surprisingly difficult and keeping it within a degree was quite hard, leading to some noticeable wiggles… The ship has no rudder and instead has two thrusters on the stern, one on each side of the ship, and is steered in a similar way to a small motorboat or rib with an outboard motor. It is also surprising how much momentum the ship can build up once you start turning in a given direction and so it is very easy to oversteer. Thankfully the route was very clear and we were just trying to maintain a straight line.
Tonight we set off towards A76a, the largest iceberg in the world and before breaking up (when it was still called A76) I think it might have been the largest iceberg ever. For reference, the iceberg is comparable in size to South Georgia, so truly huge, I can’t wait to see it! But more on that tomorrow….
24/01/23
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