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Stacy writing.
I know Thanksgiving is not usually on a Saturday, but in the interests of efficiency, holidays are liberally adjusted here. So Thanksgiving is a couple of days late - but it is on a long weekend - everybody gets two days off in a row! Well, not quite everybody, we had a couple of dives to do before the big dinner. Jennifer and I, with Jeff and Kitty as tenders, made a quick visit to Cinder Cones to video the experiment there one last time, and then went to recover the timelapse camera that has been filming a parallel experiment in front of the Station. We were horrified to see that one of the strobes had exploded underwater. This catastrophe is all the worse because we are not sure why it happened, and with our leaving date rapidly approaching (2 days!) we will not have time to trouble shoot nor fix the system. We will leave it in the capable hands of Steve the lab manager and Jim the electronics technician, who I am sure will fix it up good as new, but I don't like leaving behind a mess or a broken piece of equipment!
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| The exploded and flooded strobe - no hope of recovery for this piece of equipment! |
While we were diving, Craig roped his roommate and a friend into helping him recover the current meter. Being down to the three of us has made us rely even more on volunteer help from around the station. This was a big job as we have not been able to clear the hole out for a couple of days, because an Adelie penguin has taken up residence in it. We think the bird is ill, and we did not want to disturb it. But, we need to recover our equipment because we are going home. So Craig carefully excavated around the penguin and was able to get his current meter back without scaring the penguin too much. The penguin was completely buried in snow and had a sheath of ice from its body heat around it. With the weather worsening we can only hope that it will be okay.
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| A healthy Adelie ON the ice, not buried in snow. |
On our return to the lab we downloaded data and cleaned up our instruments, and then cleaned up ourselves for dinner. We met up with our good friends Rob, the diving safety officer, Jeff, who has been our most consistent volunteer dive tender, and Ted, the voice of MacOps who makes sure we return safely from our journeys, for dinner.
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| Ted manning the comms center at MacOps, with some help. |
The feast was amazing, all the more so because it had to be cooked for 1000 people. Delicious turkey and roast beef and of course a spicy tofu choice, real mashed potatoes (not dehydrated potato buds for once!), stuffing, luscious salad, all the trimmings, pumpkin pie, pecan pie. It was decadent. Unfortunately, there is no lingering over the table as they need to move folk through the three seatings. But we had planned our farewell and thank you party for all the volunteers who helped us out for afterwards, so we knew we could continue the warmth. Our party venue was one of our dive huts that is a little way out on the seaice. But as the weather continued to worsen we wondered if anyone would make the cold walk out. Of course, the hardy folk did, and we had a lovely time saying thank you and goodbye to many folk. It is hard to leave! And hard to imagine that in 2 days we will be back among green growing things and flowing water.
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| Some of the happy folk at our farewell party - are they that glad to see us go? |
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| One of the other visitors to our farewell party. |