Finally!

The arrival at Davis was fantastic. Flares were set off and we had a great day to weave through some fantastic bergs and ram into the very solid fast ice that surrounds Davis. It took a surprisingly short time to get to Davis from Casey, due to a large number of open leads. One in particular close to Davis had been caused by a massive ice-berg (>80km long) being blown through the sea-ice and hence clearing it out of the way. It was great to see what will be my home for the next 15 months or so. I was at the very front of the boat when I first began to make out the brightly colored buildings of Davis. Here is my first pic of my new home. And here is one of the ice-bergs that welcomed us.

Melbourne Cup

The second special occasion on the boat (i.e. an occasion where we are allowed to have three beers each) was the Melbourne Cup. We all gathered around, dressed up (at least people did) and listened to a recording of the call of the race that was taken using an MP3 player to record from a HF radio. If you know anything about the operation of long range HF it is probably obvious that we had no idea who the actual winner was at the end of the call, and so had to rely on results that were emailed in over a satellite link! Anyway, it was an evening of much mirth and mayhem. It is amazing how good some of the costumes were considering the very limited resources on the ship. Here is a picture of one of the many ingenious hats/fascinators that were produced!

Helicopter Ops

There was ice and snow all over the boat this morning some of it was quite spectacular. This is an icicle attached to the life raft.
The helicopters are flying to Casey. It is something like 60 nautical miles and is about 1.5 hours round tip. They are carrying gear and people in and out. It is a huge operation. Everyone involved is very busy and frantic. Those that aren't really involved are bored out of their minds. We are not moving, so there is no new ice to look at and no chance of seeing any wildlife unless it is silly enough to come up to the ship (now often referred to as BOB=Big Orange Boat) to see what is going on. We have 3 helicopters on board, two squirrels that will stay with us at Davis for the summer and a big S76 that is going to go home on the ship.
For those of you that aren't helicopter geeks, this is what an S76 looks like:
and this is a squirrel:

Boredom

Sitting on the boat can be quite boring. I have my email set-up on board now. It gets sent/recieved via a satellite link-up three times a day and we are limited to 30KBytes per message. I have actually done some work while on board the Aurora, that is how bored I was getting. Wrote some code that seemed to impress my boss, but suspect it is full of bugs as my head is still a bit groggy and I didn't really have any ability to thoroughly test it. Got an email from my boss indicating that the guy I am replacing (lets call him Dave) had slipped and badly sprained an ankle, which meant that he might not be available for field work for a while!
The ship is totally surrounded by near solid ice as far as the eye can see. Here is a (>180 degree) panorama of the ice from the side of the Aurora. It is stark, beautiful and fantastic, but a little boring after a couple of days!

Bergs and Emperors

We are now almost entirely surrounded by ice, and we have seen our first bergs. The photo is one of the first bergs we came across as the sun was setting. I have been spending a lot of time on the front of the boat or in the bridge. We have seen a lot more seals and have now come really close to a few emperor penguins! I got a little excited because there was a possibility that I would get to go into Casey station to have a look at some of the equipment there, but because the boat can't get close enough most of the low priority things will be dropped off the list. The weather is looking really good for the helicopters to get going...

Ice

At last there are bits of ice floating in the water! The pancake ice really does look like pancakes! Suddenly everyone on the boat is really excited again, like they were when we first left Hobart. It is a great feeling. There are till a lot of albatross around, along with a lot of other smaller birds . It is getting colder and colder and the ice is getting thicker. We are now seeing the occasional Weddell seal ontop of the ice and it is occasionally snowing. Here's a photo from the top of the Aroura at night with snow blowing through the spotlights.

Crossing the line

As per maritime tradition, there has to be some ceremony on-board to celebrate the crossing of significant lines of latitude. In this case, it is 60 degrees south. The ceremony basically involves King Neptune, a fish and a whole lot of yoghurt, Vegemite and various other food stuffs. It is all a bit of fun, but can see why it has upset a few people in the past, (especially hearing that it used to be a lot worse!). Anyway, that is probably as much as I should say about it, but here are some pictures of some of the ceremony. The young man covered in Yoghurt is our station leader at Davis this year!