Going south.. and further south..

Flashback: Saturday 26 Dec 2009

Day 17 on the ship. I can't believe that we've been on the ship for 2½ weeks already! The last week was really interesting, ever since we reached the ice, seals and penguins turned into a common part of our days! We're spending a lot of time outside, up front on the ship, just looking at enormous icebergs passing or the ship crashing through huge ice blocks, at the same time as there are penguins walking around on the ice or seals playing in the water. The penguins are very curious and come up close to the ship to have a better look. On Christmas eve we got stuck in the ice for about a day, then the captain decided to turn around to go a different way, which meant passing by a huge piece of ice that has come loose from the contintental ice. It stretches a distance of 60 x 5 km, and above the surface it's about 40 metres tall (and since an iceberg has about 10% of its volume over the surface you can imagine that we didn't want to get too close to it, to avoid a Titanic-experience). But we had to get quite close to it since that's where the open water was, and passing just next to it was amazing!

Very curious Adele-penguins (we soon learned that they are all very curious...)

The huge iceberg we passed on the way, and a penguin watching it too.

Christmas was very different, but really nice! Of course we missed being with our families, but we had a good time here celebrating the South African way. We had decorated the lounge on the ship so it was all nice and christmasy.. and then there was a crazy Christmas party on Christmas eve, the celebrations reminded us more of new year than anything else (I think it's the first time I've had champagne on Christmas eve, but on the other hand, cheese burger for lunch on this day was quite unusual to us too)... we had a great time!
We should reach the Akta bukta today or tomorrow, or in a week depending on how much more we'll get stuck in the ice, and that's where the work with offloading the ship starts! We will be busy working on the ice during a couple of days then, to get all containers off the ship and onto the caterpillars and bandwagons that will take all the stuff to the base, at the same time as we're then being flown there by helicopter. So we still don't know when to get there, but hopes are that we will reach the base before New Year. We'll just have to wait and see.

-Hanna