Back from the Dead
Day 4 – 10th January, by Hannah
After a rocky Tuesday on the Drake’s Passage, we woke up in Antarctica! (that is south of 60 degrees latitude which is the official boundary of Antarctica). Luckily most of the team including myself felt a lot better. You could say we gained our sea legs. This meant that plan A was to be on watch all day. We had two teams for both marine mammals and sea birds, with the marine mammal teams rotating every 1 and a half hours and sea birds every 3 hours. I was lucky to be on the first mammal watch, however we saw no marine mammals during our first shift. The seabird team spotted eabirds and so they were kept busy recording data during their sampling periods.
During the time that the second teams were out on deck the weather took a turn and visibility became poor and we went off survey effort. However, this didn’t mean we’d have no work to do. We had to collect our rubber boots and attend a safety briefing on how to ride in the zodiacs so that we were ready for future shore activites . Snow was falling thick and fast outside, and we started to see our first glimpses of ice bergs. It was decided that we would not go back on watch, and instead we joined in with some of the ships activities which included an interactive quiz about marine giants. As a group we got to assist with our life size textile minke whale Millie who we paraded around the lounge on deck 10. Not an easy feat to negotiate the furniture and corners……
We finished the day by having a meeting to plan for the next day in which many things were awaiting us. Filled with anticipation of crossing the Antarctic circle we planned for a 6:30 am shift to start the day, I volunteered myself for it and so had a bit of an early night excited for what may await.
