Day 2

I slept very well this night, the sea remained relatively calm all night and all day today. It was sunny and almost hot: when we were taking breaks from the work, I was wearing only my t-shirt on the deck, and felt comfortable. We are very lucky with the weather ! I hope it will stay like that until we have finished preparing the instruments, it is much easier to work when the sea is calm than when the ship rolls like crazy.

Nothing very exciting today, but rather tiring: most of our equipment was stored inside a container, but the instruments that required the longest preparation had been put first in, i.e. at the rear of the container. So we had to remove everything else first, before being able to reach these instruments. We therefore spent the whole day carrying heavy things, with the additional difficulty to keep your balance while the ship is rolling with the swell. Yesterday I was thinking that I would start doing some sport today, like running on the running machine or paddling on the paddling machine, but today there is really no need !

Yesterday, I forgot to mention, at the scientific briefing, they explained briefly what the seal tagging experiment was going to be like. 5 people would go on the ice to catch the seals and put instruments on them. 4 of them were already assigned, because they have previous experience, but there was going to be one slot for volunteers. So today I spoke with the seal tagging guy, Patrick, to tell him I was interested in participating. He said they were going to tag 10 seals, and would give a chance to volunteers to tag at least one seal, so I could certainly do it ! More on that when the day will arrive (should not be before a week at least)...

Tomorrow I have to figure out how to prepare an instrument, a Pressure Inverted Echo Sounder (PIES), for which I had attended a 5-day course to learn how to process the data, but not to learn how to prepare and deploy the instrument, which was supposed to be done by people from Southampton who know how to do it, but they ended up not coming, so nobody really knows on the ship ! I have to study the user manual tonight...