Australia to Antarctica:

After leaving Australia, we started heading even further south towards McMurdo Station. Ashley and I were back on deck and spent most of our time painting. There was a rush to get everything painted before it got too cold. Will and Abi were back in the engine room, working on cleaning all of the coolers before we hit the ice. The ship was in full on preparation mode, trying to do all of the tasks that needed to be done before the ice. We helped change the usual mooring lines out for lighter spectra lines. The ice pier at McMurdo doesn’t have the usual mooring equipment, and there are also no tugs. As such, we would actually be shooting lines ashore to teams of volunteers helping with mooring. After a week, Ashley and went back into the engine room, and the boys went back to deck work. Ashley and I spent most of our time in the engine room either tracing systems or helping the engineers with various projects. Abi and Will were working on chipping and painting the bridge wings. The highlight of this part of the trip was getting to see the Southern Lights.

After two weeks of business as usual, we reached 60˚S. This was an important waypoint for us, as at that point we were supposed to be out of the bad weather and maybe start seeing some icebergs. However, this trip was different than previous trips the Peary had made to the ice. We didn’t encounter any icebergs on the way south, only a few floating pieces. There was also no bad weather—it was pretty much smooth sailing the entire way south.

A day after 60˚S, we started ice watch. The engine room is typically unmanned at night, but in the close maneuvering situation presented by the ice, the engineers went to a 24-hour watch protocol. This ensured there was an engineer on duty at all times, able to quickly respond to any problems that may arise. In the engine room, little problems can turn into big problems quickly, making it essential to respond to the little problems early on. Will and I took the 4:00pm-12:00pm watch, while Ashley was 00:00-8:00am and Abi took 8:00am-4:00pm. While on ice watch, Will and I worked on our welding skills and spent a lot of time on our projects. The third engineer, Loren, taught us a lot about electrical circuits, how to read electrical prints, and alarm circuits. It was pretty awesome. One cool thing that happened during this part of the trip was a snowball fight. One day, it snowed and the wind caused it to accumulate in between all the frames on deck. It was perfectly fluffy snowball snow, so at midnight when Will and I got off watch, we headed outside to play in the snow. Soon we had Abi, Ashley, the 2^nd and 3^rd engineers and the 3^rd mate all involved in a snowball fight. The 2^nd mate was on bridge watch, so he would throw shovels of snow at us from the bridge. It was a ton of fun.

We entered the ice channel February 1^st and had to go through fifty miles of ice. On the way in, we stopped to refuel the ice breaker. After we finished refueling it, the icebreaker spent six hours making the channel wider for the ship. While the ship was stopped in the ice, we got to go walk on the ice. That was so cool! I got to walk on the ocean. 

During the Ice Walk

Going through the ice

By February 4^th, we were through the ice channel and at the dock. Our adventures in Antarctica are coming soon to the blog!