EXTRACTS FROM ABOARD

Wednesday 22nd Jan:

Sorry I wasn’t able to talk to you yesterday – turns out we dropped out of phone range earlier than I thought. Anyway so far so good on the voyage – not too rough and I slept pretty well actually. So yesterday I just went to the gym, which is a little cramped once you get about three people in there but still pretty good. I’ll just have to suss out a time to go before the rush. Other than that I just sat in the library making up some music playlist on iTunes then had dinner. That night one of the guys put on a movie in the cinema so I just watched that then went to bed.

Thursday 23rd Jan:

All going good on the ship so far, I don’t think anyone’s got sick yet. I’ve sorted out the issue with the gym, I just go straight after breakfast and end up having the whole thing to myself for about an hour before anyone else shows up. The food’s really good, much the same set up as when I was at Moomba. I’ve been doing alright at watching what I eat but I suppose I’m really only a couple of days in haha. Bed’s all good – just a little single with curtains that go around it. I’m sharing with Adam and all seems to be going pretty well.

Friday 24th Jan:

Thanks for being there for me I appreciate that though I think if I was getting frustrated this early on I could be in trouble haha. How did your ride go? Yeah so the days have been pretty easy going: breakfast is at 7.30 and then straight after that I go to the gym and have a shower. Basically after that its just a bit of a choice: watch some stuff on my laptop, read a book. I’ve been resizing photos to email back once I get there. I’ve taken some movies on my camera and GoPro so I’ve been piecing little bits together and editing a movie I’ll make over the whole trip. Now we’ve past the point which they expected the worst weather (which really wasn’t that bad so we’ve been pretty lucky) they are starting to schedule meetings and training courses during the day. So yesterday we did a quick sea ice travel course and this morning I had a ‘map and compass’ course which were both run by the FTO (Field Training Officer). I usually try and quickly go outside for a bit everyday. If the weather is ok we can go up on top of the ship to what they call the monkey deck which is directly on top of the bridge. It’s starting to get fairly fresh outside and with the windchill up top I can feel my fingers freeze fairly quickly haha. Then after dinner every night someone usually puts on a movie in the cinema so I’ll go and catch that and go to bed after. We go through 4 time changes a day to Davis so every second day we have to wind our clocks back an hour. They reckon tomorrow we will pass the 40 degree line (as in map degrees not temperature) and there is a little initiation ceremony for first timers so it will be interesting to see what that entails though I have heard it is a lot more tame that it used to be.

Monday 27th Jan:

All going well so far, we’ve come into the ice berg stage – they came out with an announcement but I missed it because I had my head phones in at the time haha. I’ve seen a couple come past since. They’ve been pretty massive, definitely bigger than the ship and only 10% is above water. Has been snowing outside this morning so it’s definitely getting chilly out there. We’ve had a pretty good run of weather so we’ve made good time. I think they are expecting to get to Mawson by about the 2nd or 3rd of Feb.

Wednesday 29th Jan:

I’m one of several people who have volunteered to record sea ice observations so we did a little training on that today. Basically once we start getting to more ice we have to observe and report about what type of ice we are travelling through and the thickness and such. At the moment there’s no sea ice just a few bergs scattered about every now and then. It should also be a good excuse to go have a sticky beak up in the bridge of the ship.