We made progress on many fronts today.  I began the day by talking with some of the operations management folks on station about borrowing an ice penetrating radar system that may help us find ice thin enough to penetrate with the station 24 foot well driller.  We have struck out two times now trying to drill a hole through the accumulated snow and ice in the Cape Armitage area.  In order to avoid a time consuming third strike, we plan to survey the area more intelligently with a radar system that can hopefully give us some idea if there may be thinner areas that we can subsequently drill through.  Brian Johnson, the very knowledgeable and helpful science manager, has such a machine and he even offered to go out with us tomorrow and help us search for thinner ice.  Our plan is in action, we will pick him up early in the morning with some flag poles as markers, a GPS or two for positioning, our cold weather gear and our fingers crossed.  This ocean bottom may be hard to get to but we are hoping the potential benefits will be well worth the efforts.

 Today we also had success with our broken down Piston Bulley.  For the last several days we have had to borrow a Mattrack truck to travel on the sea ice because our Piston Bulley would not start.  The Matt-Tracks is quite a machine that is essentially a standard pick up truck that has had the wheels replaced with small driving tracks.  We all suspected the battery as the mechanics have been grumbling about the station receiving a bad batch of vehicle batteries.  Today the mechanics came and got our Piston Bulley running again!  It did take them two tries.  The first try they jump started the vehicle, let it run for two hours and then we shut it off.  However, we were soon sad to learn that it still would not start.  The Heavy Shop does not give up easily though, they immediately sent down John, a mechanic who set out to replace the battery.   He then discovered that our problem was as simple as a bad battery connection.  John tightened up the connection and we were soon back in business.  The Pisten Bully has no regular hood and the battery was completely buried in the middle of the vehicle and truly took a professional mechanic to access.  Antarctica is a harsh continent, but it is great to know we have such dedicated and persistent support staff here on station to help us succeed.

 

Our Piston Bulley with our temporary replacement, a Mattrack truck

A medium sized Weddell seal, the first non-human mammal I have seen in three weeks

  Our dive this morning went well and we gathered more samples and video for Stacy’s long term environmental impact study.  Stacy and Francois dove together and after about 40 minutes they returned to the surface having completed all the tasks they set out to do.  We had a great dive tender today, his name was Ken and he is here as an electrician.  This is his first year down and he is having so much fun he already wants to winter over here.  We all had a great time and on the way back to town we noticed some interesting things.  There was a Weddell seal not too far from the outside of the hut.  We slowly walked to get a good photo, but he seemed to notice us when we were actually pretty far away so we stopped there and snapped photos.  We are very careful about disturbing the wildlife here so we keep our distance if any of our actions seem to be noticed by the animals.  Also while heading out of town we noticed a very large sled with some unidentifiable piece of equipment.  One thing about this place is that you do see all sorts of equipment that you don’t always know what purpose it serves.  We guessed this device was some kind of drill that is being used in the South Pole traverse.  This year, much of the fuel for the South Pole station is being hauled in a traverse fashion over land, snow and ice, instead of the usual cargo plane technique.  The idea is that driving the fuel there is much cheaper if they can find a safe route through the areas with heavy crevasses.   

 

 

 

 

   

Ice hole and ladder

Stacy and Francois after the dive

Stacy showing off her impressive underwater video camera with lights and scaling lasers

Looking across the sea ice at all the heavy equipment parked there, including a giant sled and a drill looking machine

We also are ready to put SCINI back together for another series of dives.  Jim has been making fantastic progress on the software, Marco has been putting the finishing touches on the camera system, Francois is rebuilding a light ring and fixing several other mechanical issues, I have been working on the electronics among other things, and finally Bob is making sure we do everything just like he wants it…. hee hee, just kidding.  To end the day, I had a fantastic surprise, we finally received some flat mail.  Sometimes it takes some time to receive mail here , at other times the mail shows up fairly quickly.  Today, I was lucky enough to receive four (yes four!!) pieces of flat postal mail, all from my sweetie, Tina.  I will open one every day or two now as I don’t want to become too spoiled and open them all at once!  Yay for me, and thank you Tina for your sweet letters.  I miss you too!

 

DJ’s hand opening a main electronics can

   

Letters from Santa Cruz, yipee!