Yesterday I dove over at Leonie which is a hard dive site to do as it requires quite a number of things to all happen i.e. the ice has to be clear, the weather window has to be good both to allow the run time from the site to the decompression chamber to be less than 35 minutes. Also the divers have to be within their 3 day dive period and not dove out. So yesterday this all worked out and Dave and I dove Leonie for the first time in many years. Dave is the only person who has dove their before on base. We were doing a biodiversity study at 20m and at 5m. There were some amazing animals I hadn’t noticed before probably because this is the first dive in a while that I haven’t been helping with collections etc.

All over I noticed this spider web type filament it turns out to be the tenticles of a worm that burrows in the mud. There was also a marine equivalent of a wood louse that Dave hadn’t seen before. I will write more about these two species in later blogs.

Today I dove with Terri we were meant to do two dives one to replace her logger (again more detail later) and one in Hanger Cove doing collections. The logger was reading errors so we didn’t replace it however, we did get out to collect sea lemons, brittle stars (more on those later date as well) and nemotean worms. There was also another animal we were meant to collect but none were around. We were diving pretty close to a grounded iceberg at 30m which was interesting to see not only the large underwater mass but also the scarring to the bottom due to the icerberg.

We surfaced after 23 minutes and within 4meters a lepoard seal that was very large surfaced behind us. Needless to say we both got in the boat very quickly when JJ the dive supervisor told us firmly ‘get out of the water fast’. We hung around for 5 minutes watching the lep glide through the water and he followed us for a little ways.