Stacy writing today -

Our morning started out with - you guessed it - more training. First was Waste Management. McMurdo has an amazing recycling program - every bit of waste that is produced on the station is shipped back to the United States, and over 60% of it is recycled. This is much higher than is attained in any city in the US, and would be impressive even without the 8300 mile journey. The waste management class goes over why it is so important to sort our trash, the first step in the recycling process, and how it takes the cooperation of every single person to make this work - even one person who dumps all their trash mixed together contaminates an entire load, which then can't be recycled. It takes only a little extra effort, but the results, keeping the Antarctic pristine, are worth it.

	Some of the many categories we sort our trash into.

Next, Jennifer, Jonna, Jim and Craig went off to "Happy Campers School." This is Antarctic Survival training, and I am sure they will tell you more about it when they return. Because Dan and I were here last year and have had the training before, we do the shorter refresher course that you already heard about.

	The dive locker (blue building) with our Pisten Bully track vehicle parked out front. The 6 divers on my team overload the small building, so we are housed in the "annex" - the orange dive hut next door.

With the "kids" safely at school, I went to do my checkout dive with Rob Robbins, the diving safety officer here. Rob has been coming to the Antarctic for more than 20 years, and is an incredibly knowledgeable diver. He is the person I would most want in the water with me if something went wrong, and is also a darling friend. Dan, who still has a bit of a cold, and Tracy, one of the firefighters, were our dive tenders. With all the bulky gear we use to protect us from the cold, it's much easier to have help getting dressed and getting out of the water. I am diving in a borrowed drysuit of Rob's, because our shipped crate containing my drysuit (sent last August) has not arrived here yet. The first thing I did was forget my light - but I remembered as we got on our way. Suiting up was fine until we tried to connect my inflator hose to my drysuit - but the connector was one for the surface supply diving rig. Fortunately, Rob had the correct one in his box of tricks. But during the replacement process (Dan and Tracy fussing around my abdomen with wrenches - I felt like Frankenstein), the housing got cracked. This led to a more complex operation, where Rob got a replacement organ from the dive locker. Finally, we were all ready to get in the water. Then I forgot my light again - I can’t get used to the idea that it is so DARK under the ice - and guess what, it was DARK. Usually plenty of light comes through the ice overhead, but now the ice has been building up for 3 years, an effect of the iceberg B15 that is blocking normal water flow patterns in McMurdo Sound. The thicker ice lets very little light through, and you do need a light to be able to see much on the bottom. But it is as beautiful as ever.

	Dive gear galore! Note the obvious stack of large blue dive lights.

We were diving near the Jetty, a pile of rocks that supports the seawater intake for the desalinization plant that makes all the fresh water for McMurdo Station. There are huge vase sponges on the bottom at about 90 feet, looking like ghosts in the distance. We worked our way up the slope, past experiments and bits of rubble, carpets of tiny white anemones, lumbering isopods as big as my hand, small fish that slowly move away only when we brush past them. Many things are bearing eggs, streamers and coils of tiny white flecks loop through bryozoans and across bush sponges. We work our way back along the rocks, homing in on the flashing beacons on our down line and the dive hole that looks like a bright moon in the dark ice. Too quickly, this dive is over...and from now on, there will be work to do instead of sightseeing. It feels great to be back in this wonderland.

	The Weddell seal that came to visit Dan and Tracy while Rob and I were underwater.

Dan and I finished the day with computer work, and trying to learn a new sport - Takraw. This is volleyball played with your feet, and none of us were very good at it, though it was quite fun to try. Then Dan tried to teach me to play basketball, but I was no better at that than at Takraw. We went to our dorms with beautiful snow falling quietly, knowing that the happy campers would have a warm night since there was no wind. But I woke up every hour convinced that I could hear the wind blowing and they were suffering from cold...it never was, but I worried about them all the same.

Dan executes the perfect Takraw spike with his head, a devastating blow to the other team.