November 11th

There are many things that one doesn't ever plan on doing during their life. One of those things for many of us is putting on a drysuit to go for a snow mobile ride. This is just what we did today. At the other end of the ride we jumped into a perfectly good dive hole, built a fence, and hopped right back on the snow mobile for an hour ride home.

Two groups of us did this weird thing today and because of this we finished the bulk of the things to do at Cape Bernaccii. During most of the dive we were thinking about the long bumpy trip back and how we would like to minimize the number of trips to do and because of this productivity was the name of the game. We combined three normal dives into one before we swam back to the cold above (you can tell snow madness is kicking in when we are talking about the water as warm.)

To allow these long dives are the tanks that we use out here. Instead of 95 cu. Ft. tanks that we use in McMurdo we are using two 72's giving us a total of 144 cu. Ft. of air per dive (the two steel tanks weight twice as much as the 95's making it just more than a hundred pounds of tanks strapped to our backs.) This means we stay until our dive computers, cold, or frustration drive us to the surface. None of us look forward to the accent. We go through long safety stops to aid in the out gassing of nitrogen. The pro's know how to stay warm during these safety stops . Oliver goes through an elaborate dance to keep his body moving, Stacy, Kathy, and Rob Robbins just float occasionally dumping the cold air from their gloves and replacing it with warm. I do the chicken dance. You all know the chicken dance... the one done at roller skating rinks, weddings, and any other gathering of people looking for a good time. And let me tell you, It SCREAMS warmth. This is made much better if you sing along through your regulator. Your dive buddy stares at you with either "Ok, Andrew finally lost it" or "the chicken dance! That's a great safety stop dance!"

Andrew's other post dive ritual.

Then there was Dan. Dan put a hole in his dry glove. Being a little crazy but wanting to get stuff done Dan continued his dive for another fifteen minutes before finally surfacing. I don't know what safety stop dance he might have tried but imagine keeping your hand in ice water for fifteen minutes straight while trying to work and stay warm. Most of us would have gone straight to the surface going "Owwweeee Oooowwweeee Oooooweeee" Dan just finished the dive.

That night we all took some time to learn a new craft. Stacy held a brief lecture on the turks head. A knot that every seaman should know and since we are spending so much time on the ice, maybe we should to. We all had varying success, (I think Dan's turned out the best.) We then called it a day and turned in. Tomorrow we get to finish the close site fence. We are just ahead of schedule but weather can change that at any time.

Aloha,
andrew