BEST Entry #3

BEST Entry #3(Day 6)

Date: Sunday, April 5th, 2009
Location: Steaming to Station 3, crunching through ice.
Time: 2315


Change of pace is the name of the game. First of all, I eat breakfast. I rarely do this. Common knowledge states that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I’d like to switch important with inconvenient. However, my schedule has quite changed a bit. This morning, we had our first process station. Process station consists of many CTDs and ice core sampling. Our CTD(for Primary Production) went in around 8:00am. With a long morning of work, a easy-access, already made, buffet style breakfast is something I won’t pass up. So far, 4 consecutive mornings of food, if you consider a dry bagel and water from Airport vendor, twice.

A lot of our gear is in two radvans(vans that are used for stable and radioactive isotopes. Without heaters, they’re frigid. Luckily, there are heaters. The whole sampling process, with filtering took until 1:00pm. The main lab, mostly holds everybody. There are three main benches and because we were late getting set up, we got shafted and got a bench side with lots of traffic. I haven’t decided when I’m gonna start asking anyone who passes by if they’ve touched my ass. Judging from the scientific community here, they’ve won’t think it’s remotely funny.

The rest of the day, we watched our incubation chambers to make sure none of our lines were getting frozen over, which they did. I want to post a picture of Mike, my boss, working on them while I sit up in the bridge watching for birds, but internet is too slow to post.

However, there’s a reason for being up on the bridge. I was speaking with one of the bird surveyors and she invited me up to see what they were doing after dinner. Cruised on up and there was nothing but white sheets of ice and steadily shifting crack in the ice from the steadily moving Healy. There are two bird watchers that also note marine mammal sitings. We briefly talked about how they never see anything and all of a sudden we get a siting of Walruses or as I like to call them, Walri.

We first saw this group of 15/20. Then after a little while later, we started to see MASSIVE groups of these guys. Not often or ever, were that many Walri seen. Announcement went out over the loud speaker(called the Pipes) about the colony. Maybe around 200/300.

Again, wish I could post a picture.

Well, now back out to check on the incubator.