The Bouy Run

lat: 70 31.18S
The buoy run, the compacted work, the bug brought on board at South Georgia to a team that can not afford to have a man down and the ability to just keep pushing yourself in darkness, murky green waters and overcast skies cannot really be described. Your mind on high alert just starts thinking, and never stops...

And then the sun comes out, and your mind stops the eternal circles it has spiralled into, the internal
struggles, the mindless loops. And you realise that none of it matters. You are here. Now. For that is the power of the Polar region. The eternal energy, the sea breeze that smells of sea, not fish. You look back from where you've come from and you see this dark mass of storm clouds shielding all horizons from view and the sharp contrast as it breaks into light.

Along with the sunshine and the spirits it lifts, the polar region brought too the morphation of fingerless
gloves and hands, and hat as hair. Contest to be alpha male swung into earnest between the boys on our team. Elephant seal chest bumps and couch squishing couldn't determine the position, forcing the stiff competition onto the ping pong table and volley ball court. One sprained ankle later and it was decided that the man who cried the least while watching "7 pounds" could be alpha male...the position in still open.

After the fire, the captain delivered a flash for inspiration for us: 25 songs all with the words "fire" in the title!

We ran two very important sleep studies linked to latitude/sunshine/oxygen supply on this trip. We
discovered that one can function for 24 hours straight, if half of the time is spent working and the other
exploring an Island. But you will feel like hell at the end of your next shift. However, if you arrive at the ice, and the sun comes out, you can run for 36 hours (on three hours sleep), and still not feel tired, but be told that its not a good idea to operate heavy machinery and your pupils dilate...;-)

In the early ours of the morning towards the end of the buoy run eviction notices were slipped under our doors (we had to move back into our shared cabins as everyone will be returning soon). We retaliated by spending the next day sleeping on the monkey island (the sun had come out :-)) under a pile of blankets. You might enjoy that I managed to get sunburnt between 5 and 7 am this morning! At -2'C.

We are back at the ice shelf. And it is beautiful. The relentless waves have calved deep blue caves out of the cliffs and the seals and whales frollic around us.

This is the first run the the Agalhus has ever done to the ice shelf where no other ice was reached first. To the officers' knowledge, no other ship has ever reached this shelf with out sailing through other ice first.