Jan. 15: Antarctic Saturday Hike

Jan. 15, 2011

Happy Saturday everyone!  Today was another beautiful day down here.  No wind, which is always a good day in my book.  It warmed up a little bit too, 41 degrees right now.  Almost feels like Hawaii here. 

Mark and I did a short mission today with the 2nd REMUS around the northern islands just to get some local data and make sure it was acting like it should.  Everything went great and we picked it up right before lunch.  Since everything went really well the last two days we are going to take tomorrow off and then start doing some longer missions offshore to investigate where the tagged penguins are foraging. 

Mark and I had clean-up duty after breakfast and lunch and then the whole station cleaned the station (House Mouse style).  We also had clean-up duty after dinner, which is quite extensive.  One benefit of being on the ship is you really don’t have to clean up after yourself at all, but I would not trade that for the food here. 

Mark Moline, Ian Robbins on a Saturday Hike

Almost forgot, Mark and I took two-hour hike up the glacier behind the station.  It is the same one we hiked when we first got here, but today we went all the way over to the other side to a little beach that had a backdrop of glaciers as far as we could see.  It is the same coastline we were boating along yesterday, but we were much closer now. 

It was a little bit scary because the ice can crack underneath and yet still be covered by snow, so we went slowly and took poking sticks to make sure we weren’t going to fall in.  It was beautiful being up that high and being able to see in all directions. 

Mark took bunch of photos in a circle that we are going to try to stitch together. Coming soon!