November 4

This is Aaron writing today. Today was a very mellow day, and as a result there isn't much to say about it. The plan was for Stacy and John to go to the food room of the Berg Field Center (BFC); and for Dan, Andrew, and I to go out to Cape Evans to collect some tagged. Unfortunately, we all woke up to a veritable blizzard, so we called off the dive, as we did not have the utmost confidence in our ability to find our way out there, seeing as how we were all still relative newcomers to the Antarctic. So we concentrated on helping John and Stacy organize and pack for our upcoming trip to the field camp in New Harbor. Of course the weather blew through relatively quickly and the day became quite nice, but we were already waste deep in freeze dried food by that point, so there was no escape.

Upon reviewing the amount of food we had collected, we were quite shocked. We thought that we may have abnormally large appetites, because what six people could really eat 367 lbs of food in 10 days? Well, apparently we nearly had the exact amount of food per person per day, as is standard, which is obviously a tribute to the tremendous planning abilities of Stacy and Andrew, who put their heads together to plan our meals for the week. However, it is a weighty responsibility that they took upon their shoulders, as only history (and the rest of the group) will judge the success of their planning, but it certainly looks promising.

We wrapped up the evening with a wonderful dinner at Scott Base. We were very kindly invited over for dinner by an Australian diving group that was working through the Antarctica New Zealand program. The people at Scott Base were very outgoing and friendly, and the food was quite good. We had a really good time socializing with our Australian and New Zealand counterparts and learned quite a bit from each other. The fact that they have a really nice bar (called the Tatty Flag) with cheap drinks certainly helped lubricate the cross cultural communication. A good time was had by all.