This is a picture taken at the height of the Phytoplankton bloom in the summer.

And this is a picture taken last week at Rose Gardens where the visibility was in the region of 150 feet. It was stunning.

The girls doing CTD say there is basically no phytoplankton really in the water anymore. Bad for the wildlife that feeds off it but good for us divers 🙂

Professor Peck who spent 2 months down here this year diving with us wrote a very interesting paper on phytoplankton see the press release.

This is a picture taken by Claire Doc of a Snow Petrel (apparently there are only around a 1000 breeding pairs) which landed for a rest next to the door of Old Bransfield. They are one of only a handful of birds which breed in Antarctica. From wikipedia I got the following information.

“Possibly the most beautiful bird in the Antarctic, the Snow Petrel is pure white with black underdown and conspicious black eyes. They have a small black bill and bluish gray feet. They are restricted almost exclusively to cold antarctic waters, preferring pack ice, icebergs and ice floes as their main habitat. They feed mainly by surface-dipping while on the wing.

Snow Petrels tend to fly low over the water but very high over land to avoid predators such as South Polar skuas. Their flight is more fluttering than most petrels.

Unlike most of the petrel family, Snow Petrels are nervous at the nest and will desert their eggs if overly disturbed.”

The ship will be here in less than a week only 3 workdays away and there is so much to do in the boatshed before handing over to the wintering boatman. I have been desperatly typing away with some hand over instructions and doing as much maintenance as possible while still getting the boats out for the normal science. This morning I spent a few hours sorting out one of the trailers hence the mucky hands – sorry mum not very ladylike I know but what do you expect!

Yesterday we did a shore dive off the newly installed slipway. It was pretty icy as you can see in the picture the sea water froze over the rocks.

Colette is the line tender in the picture. It was a bit slippy for the divers to get in down the ramp!

Happy St Patricks Day!

Today we had a Dive Emergency Scenario to test the systems in place in case of a Dive Emergency on Base. It was all very educational as these things always are. I was driving the boat and also was the DMT in the compression chamber looking after JJ. We went down to 18m and did a short dive just to check everything. The day ended with a debrief just before dinner.

With Rothera being firmly in Autumn and the sun setting at 8pm and not rising until 7am we are getting beautiful sunrises and sunsets.

This was taken from my bedroom window the other morning.

Again taken from my bedroom window as the sun set.

This is me at the lathe in the wood shop.

The platter I finished last night. Again made out of a piece of the old bar.

This is the view from my office at the boatshed. Needless to say we called off the last dive of the day due to wind and almost nil visibility! Paperwork all day tomorrow me thinks!

Our Base Commander is John Withers. He started with BAS as a diving officer 9 years ago. He has worked at all the bases except for KEP. This is him in the kitchen on Saturday. A group of us gave the chefs the afternoon off and we made dinner. We are now down to 45 on base so it was an easier meal to do than at the height of the season.

The dinner was duck and lamb pate with caramalized onions made by Al Homer the Mech with main course of steak (to order) with potatoe wedges, carrots, mushrooms, cauliflower cheese with a peppercorn brandy sauce made by 4 people. Dessert was chocolate rasberry cake made by Claire Doc.

My contribution was to make the brandy sauce, plate up the starters and dessert and cook the steaks. Not a bad way to spend the afternoon seeing as it was foggy outside and we couldn’t even see the boatshed from the top part of base 🙂

Hope you all had a great weekend.

This picture was taken by Terri the marine assistant at Rothera on a dive I did with her on my birthday at Anchorage wall. The Labidiaster radiosus get stressed pretty easily and when they do their legs drop off. They are a sea star which is found in the south pacific and atlantic oceans.

Down here at Rothera our last name is what we do so Claire is Claire Doc, I am Ash Boat etc. So the above picture is Ash Boat and Johnny Mech out with the girls (AFI PHD beakers) doing world class science. There isn’t enough room on the CTD boat so we take out two and raft them up so the three or four beakers have a science platform and we have a sunbathing one!

Wow what a dive. The visibility seemed to be endless. Rose Gardens is a pinnacle dive just off Anchorage. There was quite a lot of swell on the pinnacle itself so we got dropped in a little swim away.

We went in to take back the marine equivalent of a wood lice and also to collect some seal bones (see above picture).