Goodbye, winter overs!

I'm still way behind in time-line here since there was sooooo much to say about the trip here and the first week on station. So this so-long is two weeks late...but better late than never!

Back on Sunday, October 13, we completed our week of winter to summer turnover, the ship's crew called all-aboard for the LMG's northbound voyage back to Chile, the gangplank was craned onto the first deck...

...and the winter crew gathered on deck to wave goodbye to the summer crew standing on the pier as the ship started slowly motoring away through the loose sea ice.

If you can turn up the volume enough to hear this video, you'll hear someone on board yelling, "There's open water! Get in it!" That's because it's tradition here that when a ship leaves port, those left on station do a polar plunge as a goodbye to the departing passengers.

But even the die-hard polar plungers on station realized there is still far too much sea ice for that kind of send-off. The only open water we could see was that being created by the ship as it chugged away.

But since I'm so behind in posts, as this one is going live the LMG has already been up to Punta Arenas and made it all the way back to Palmer (with scientists on board!), and when all is said and done, there will be half-a-dozen port calls this summer--and just as many departures/opportunities for people to jump in the water with much less sea ice to contend with. Not sure I'm going to join that club, but we'll see.

For now, let's try to catch back up with real time and station goings-on as the summer gets into full-swing!

Appreciating Palmer

In and among the work insanity of the first week on station, I got at least a few opportunities to pause for a moment and appreciate where I AM, which is incredible!

Sheathbills watch our every move, acting as the peanut gallery of Palmer.

The sunsets are so beautiful even on land, and the ship docked is so striking, its size dwarfing the station even further.

The winter-overs staged an open-mic night, and winter crew, summer crew, and even some of the ship's crew serenaded us for the evening in the cozy lounge.

And then--for me the highlight of the week (other than moving into my room on station)--the outgoing Cargo Senior got permission for us to sneak away for a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon, her last day on station, and snowshoe up the glacier behind the station. It was a gorgeous day and it felt amazing to be outside and getting exercise that didn't involve moving boxes around.

We stopped to see a momma seal and her pup who have been hanging out on the still-solid sea ice at the foot of the glacier...

...and then we hiked up onto the glacier itself, toward the profile of Mt. Williams (almost entirely shrouded in clouds) in the distance.

Turning around and looking back out toward station and over the sea ice was just as jaw-droopingly gorgeous.

Huge icebergs remind us that what looks like endless ice is really the sea, which will soon be open water for most of the summer.

And getting to appreciate the gorgeous natural setting of this outpost was all the reminder I needed that even though I'm not sure I know what I'm doing in my job and it all feels a little overwhelming at the moment, I'm so thrilled and glad and lucky to be here and it is all 100% completely worth it.

Turnover week

From the moment we walked across the gangplank onto Anvers Island and Palmer Station, the week we had for turnover was completely bonkers.

The winter Cargo team was waiting for us on the pier...

...and while most of the incoming summer team went off on their station orientation and started various trainings, the two guys who will be working the boathouse and I joined the Palmer Cargo duo and the ship's crew to start offloading cargo containers.

I got an instant, vertical-learning-curve, crash course in marine cargo operations, hopping on taglines, working up to marshaling when the crane brought the loads pier-side, and so on.

As soon as ship off-load was complete and cargo dispersed around the station to places it could safely sit temporarily until we have time to officially receive everything, it was time to mobilize the entire station to make sure the hours-long offload of 50,000 gallons of fuel from the ship to the station (to feed our operations the next six months) was accomplished without incident (looking out especially for line leaks that would contaminate the environment). We all took shifts walking particular parts of the fuel hose or just watching attachment points.

It was during this task that I started to notice the thing that makes Palmer so special: everyone here is so caring and community minded. It really feels like a family, and that everyone is striving to do things in the nicest and most helpful and coziest ways possible. The team in charge of the fuel transfer literally actually put someone on the task of bringing hot chocolate and baked goods (kindly provided by the kitchen) around to the volunteers. U.N.B.E.L.I.E.V.A.B.L.E.

Then there was the turnover of emergency response duties from the winter to summer crew. Those who have been following along here for several years might remember that during the winter at South Pole, our crew was small enough that emergency response was the responsibility of the entire crew rather than a team of professionals dedicated to the task. Palmer is even smaller than Pole, so here even in the summertime the support staff also acts as the emergency response team, with some people having gone to fire school, some working on a medical trauma team, and so on. This time around, I'll be a first-responder. This was the first of the monthly drills we'll be doing all summer.

Then it was time to reload the ship with the northbound cargo...

...and somewhere in there, I FINALLY got to move out of the container in the ship's cargo hold and into a room on station. This movement was a well-coordinated flip-flop between winter and summer crew. As soon as the emergency response turn-over was complete, the seasons instantly were considered switched. We slung all the summer people's luggage off the boat with the ship's crane, slung all the winter people's luggage onto the boat, the winter crew moved into staterooms onboard and started eating their meals onboard, and the summer crew moved into rooms on the station and started eating in the station galley. Radios were passed from winter to summer crew, desks and offices were relinquished, and the winter crew's exit truly began and we summer folk had to hope we were on our feet (and over our dock rock) and could take the reins.

I'm not going to lie...I was ECSTATIC to get out of that cargo hold and into a room on land!!! It is twice as much space and rather than two roommates, I currently have it all to myself. HEAVEN. I knew that as soon as we get another ship (which is actually just about to happen as this post goes live...but I'm still playing catch up with these posts) I would have a roommate from among the scientists coming in. But after that time on the ship, two weeks of a room all to myself that had a window to the outside world and didn't smell like urine or vibrate with the ruckus of enormous diesel engines felt like the best thing that had ever happened to me.

I also started to take the driver's seat at the desk I was taking over from the winter Cargo Senior, in this office that I'll be sharing with the Cargoperson and the Mechanic. (My desk is on the right.)

That first week was one 12-hour work day after another (including Saturday; we have 6-day work weeks here) and so much information coming at me all the time that usually by noon I was having trouble thinking straight, and I would scarf down some lunch in 15 minutes and then get back to it. There was just so much to do with the ship in port and trying to glean as much information as I can from the winter person I am replacing before she disappeared (especially since the full-time program person who should be my boss but who quit back in August after hiring me still hasn't been replaced). Totally exhausting, and one of the more intense weeks of my life. Which is why these posts did not start going up until after the ship left. But, oops, we're not QUITE there yet....

Arriving at Palmer

Though the antics of the Drake slowed us down enough that our trip to Palmer ended up being five days long rather than four, eventually we reached the peninsula of Antarctica, the waters calmed, and nature rewarded us in spades for what we had just endured. Our first morning along the peninsula, there was spectacular pancake ice surrounding the ship.

It was really magical, watching and listening to the ship move through it.

As the pancake ice started to break up...

...we started to see some beautiful ice bergs.

It was a bit of a bummer that we'd been delayed, because as a consequence, we went through what is supposed to be the most scenic part of the trip during the dead of night, when we wouldn't have been able to see anything even if we'd stayed up for it.

But when we all did get up for sunrise the next morning, we were gifted with an absolutely gorgeous morning and approach to Palmer.

I know I keep using the word magical, but it was so magical! Can you spot the penguin scuttling away from the ship in this video?

We were all just rapt.

And then there it was, tucked onto a little hill above the sea ice: Palmer Station.

Till now, I'd only seen it in photos, and had been trying to study its layout from an arial photo I got during training in Denver (clearly taken later in the summer when the sea ice was gone and the station was much less snowy).

In person, just waking up from its winter slumber, with a glacier reaching down towards it, the station looked impossibly tiny and cozy.

And the 20-person winter-crew was standing on shore, welcoming us in and waiting to grab the ship's lines and end their five-month isolation.

Straits of Magellan and the Drake Passage

There are certain places on this planet that, as my younger self read and learned about the world from books, sounded just unbelievably exotic to me and are now a particular thrill to experience in person. I felt like that when I went to Borneo last year, and I felt that way again as the LMG began its pass through the Straits of Magellan and passed Cape Horn. I mean, come on: the freaking STRAITS OF MAGELLAN! This is some legendary age-of-exploration stuff here. And I was there! As the radar of the ship's location showed (the southern tip of South America on the left and Isla de los Estados on the right)...

...and then I went up on deck to experience first hand. That's the sun setting over Cape Horn behind me...

...and Isla de los Estados glowing in that setting sun on the other side of the ship.

Total peace and beauty.

I'm glad I appreciated it for everything it was worth, because already the waters were getting rockier, and the next couple days were something else. I was on so many sea-sickness meds and was so out of it from that and the constant movement that honestly the whole thing was a total blur. But here's a little bit of what it was like to go through the Drake.

At one point I walked into the galley as one of the first really big swells tossed us, and several bowls of fruit that had been on shelves above the tables all went soaring across the room and the fruit landed and started rolling everywhere. One of the ship's crew came in right behind me and I regret not having stopped to take a video of us trying to pick up all the fruit. Every time we would reach out for an apple or orange, the ship would roll and it would dart away from our hands. It took forever to clean up. I can tell you definitively, though, that prescription anti-nausea meds for sea-sickness (despite giving you terrible dry mouth and dilating your eyes so you can't see anything up close and making you too tired to focus on much of anything) WORK, even if they make you feel like a zombie.

The upper decks of the ship were closed while we were rocking and rolling through the worst of it--too much danger of someone getting tossed overboard, which would have been a death sentence. We did manage, though, to complete a Drake Passage survey--one of the science projects that happens on the LMG: every hour or so, we released sensors into the water that recorded temperature as they sank, plus we did water samples several times/day. There were multiple shifts of volunteers, so I signed up to help with that and am glad I did. That was a good excuse to get a couple breaths of fresh air and a legit reason for being briefly on deck as we held on tight for science!

Other than that, I just slept as much as I could through the worst of the Drake, which was certainly not even as bad as it could have been! I wish I had more pictures of it, but I was too out of it to be able to think about how to record the experience.

Aboard the Lawrence M. Gould

The LMG is the smaller of the two icebreakers the US Antarctic program leases for its marine operations around Antarctica. (The larger--the Nathaniel B. Palmer (aka the NBP)--is too large to dock at Palmer; to remedy that and make Palmer access more flexible, all science will pause at Palmer the summer of 2021-22 for the build-out of a new pier that can host the NBP.)

But in the meantime, only the LMG can take passengers to Palmer. Once I got to know it, it felt like a cozy-enough ship. It has a lounge...

...and of course a galley...

...and a bunch of cute staterooms, each with a bathroom.

The problem, for me, was that there were more of us (the ship crew, the Palmer summer station support crew, and two scientists coming down early) than there were stateroom spaces. And the way they increase passenger capacity is by creating berthing in the cargo hold, in shipping containers outfitted with bunk beds.

Since I was one of the few support staff on the ship who had never been to Palmer, my lowly status earned me a bunk in the cargo hold, along with the two female scientists. It was clear to me everyone else knew what a miserable situation this was going to be, because people in the staterooms kept telling me that being in the hold is actually great because it's a smoother ride through the Drake (the rocking of the boat being less intense on lower decks of the boat). But I couldn't help but notice that none of the people who were in staterooms chose to relocate to the open bunks in the cargo hold. And there was a reason for that. It was miserable. The station manager tried to help the three of us in this container out by giving us a container with a bathroom, so that we didn't have to climb the stairs up to the main deck every time we needed to pee. But that ended up backfiring because the plumbing in the bathroom didn't work and it ended up leaking all over and stinking up the container the whole trip. Plus the sound of the ship's engines was incredibly loud down in the cargo hold, we did end up having to climb the dangerous staircase up to the main deck every time we needed to pee (a seriously precarious task while we were rocking and rolling our way through the Drake, so that it felt safer to just stay on the upper decks as much as possible, negating any potential benefit of having a "room" on a lower deck), there was so little space in the container that if one person needed to walk through, the others had to get into their bunks to let her pass, and all we had to hold our stuff was a gym locker each.

But, that was just how it was for the nine nights we spent living on the LMG (the last night of our time in Punta Arenas, the five nights at sea--rather than three because of a late departure and a rough passage across the Drake--and three more nights once we arrived at Palmer). One of those things about Antarctic adventures you just have to suck up!

I was finally starting to get to know my way around the ship as we navigated along Tierra del Fuego (if you have really good eyes or can expand this picture, you can see our route starting in yellow and then turning red)...

...and kept wary eyes on the weather forecast for the Drake passage. The downward-pointing beige bit coming from the top of the frame in the picture below is southern South America, the little bit of beige coming up from the bottom of the frame is the peninsula of Antarctica, the space between them is the Drake Passage, and the color red is bad news!

And so we braced ourselves for an "extra adventure-y" voyage south!

South from Chile

Holy moly, the past two weeks have been quite a ride. There is so much to catch you up on. I will just start to do that little by little, post by post. I am all settled into Palmer Station now, but when last we spoke I was just leaving Punta Arenas, Chile. So let's back up and take a step toward getting you caught up....

For our last night in Punta Arenas, we slept aboard the LMG. (Oh, and a correction from the last post: I've since learned that the US Antarctic program does not actually own the two icebreakers it operates on the peninsula--just leases them.) This was handy for me since I am working in Cargo at Palmer this season. At McMurdo and South Pole cargo is transported mostly by plane, but Palmer is a marine station, so I began my ongoing crash-course in marine cargo operations. At first this just consisted of observing the movement of a RHIB that had been transported north for the winter back onto the ship for its return to Palmer for the summer.

Speaking of my job...I was hired in August by the Peninsula Logistics Coordinator (a full-time position with the program) as Palmer's Cargoperson for the summer, to be working under an on-site Cargo Senior. A couple of weeks after I signed the Cargoperson contract, I heard through the grapevine that the woman who hired me had quit the program. So--I was assured by the station manager when I reached out--things were going to be a little chaotic but manageable. Then, as we were starting the flights south to Punta Arenas, the guy who was supposed to be Cargo Senior apparently decided he was too overwhelmed by the chaos side of things and he decided at the last minute not to get on the plane. Long story short, the station manager ended up convincing me that under the circumstances, the best option would be for me to step into the Cargo Senior role, be able to complete turn-over with the winter Cargo Senior to start learning the job, the winter Cargoperson would stay an extra few weeks, and the program would fast-track the hiring of a summer Cargoperson to take over the job I was supposed to do. So I got on the boat with a 3-inch stack of operating documents to read to learn about the much more desk-, paperwork-, and computer-system-heavy job I am now going to be doing. Eek!

But I wasn't about to bail as well, so when the time came, on a day too windy for the LMG to leave the pier unassisted, a tugboat came along to drag us out to sea...

...we watched Punta Arenas fade off into the distance...

...we did a life boat drill in case of having to evacuate the ship (and by the way, for those of you who know him, doesn't the guy second from right look EXACTLY like my brother, in this picture?)...

...and off we sailed into the Southern Ocean.

Well, to be more accurate, we weren't in the open ocean to start with. The trip from Punta Arenas to Palmer Station generally takes four days: one day navigating the straights and islands of Tierra del Fuego; two days for the crossing of the mighty Drake Passage, aka the "Roaring Forties" and the "Furious Fifties" (those numbers referring to latitude) between South America and Antarctica, famously the most consistently tumultuous seas on the planet; and the fourth day on calmer waters again, navigating the rest of the way south along the Antarctic Peninsula.

While we were protected from the open ocean those first 30 or so along Tierra del Fuego, we were lucky to see a whole bunch of Commerson's dolphins!

But we knew the calm waters wouldn't last, as the weather forecast did not look fantastic. While we could, we visited the outside decks of the LMG, appreciating the epic sunsets.

That's probably enough for now...
Next post I'll talk about the ship itself before it makes its voyage across the Drake!