Saturday morning the Laurence Gould came to alongside Rothera Wharf – they come in every year at the end of January. They disembarked 25 people on the basket system and loaded on 20 of us from the station for a science cruise out into Margerite Bay.

The Bonner Lab girls loved the water sampling and CTD setup onboard. This is Terri and Amber. Their CTD is calibrated every year in the US so ours is strapped onto their setup and they did 3 CTD sites on the cruise and then compare the readouts between them and ours allowing us to calibrate ours to their settings without sending ours off station.

We got a full tour of the vessel including the engine room and the bridge. I was allowed to drive the ship as well.

Although we were only 35km from base it felt good to get away and it felt like we got a proper weekend off with Sunday off as well.

After we got alongside at Rothera I went up the science mast on the ship and took some aerial photos.

After the mini cruise we did an oil spills exercise which was an envelope opened at the wharf and it was a ruptured tank on the ship spilling oil. Because the ship was at the wharf Danny and I launched off the beach at North Cove and came round to South Cove and then were tasked to install a boom around the ship and then deploy the skimmer inside the boom. It was quite a fun exercise in the sun.

We then had the annual Gould vs Rothera football match which was again won by BAS. After dinner it was time to party in the garage in the same style as New Years. I went to bed at midnight but the partying continued till 5am on Sunday morning. The Gould left Rothera at 7am.

So quite a busy Saturday here on base!