Hello Everyone,
It's been almost a week since my last post, geez time flies... We have been out at sea on the small boats lots since I last wrote. The photos below show some of our successful trips out towing instruments, setting our Radars up on remote islands (as if Palmer Station wasn't remote enough...), and climbing towers to rig antennas for radio communications out to the remote sites. So far, everything has been working very well and the data we are collecting is looking amazing. I hope you enjoy the pictures.
Hank
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| Me climbing the VHF radio tower to install a whip antenna for extending our comms out to the outer islands. |
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| The VHF antenna |
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| Our HF Radar antenna with a big blue glacier behind it. |
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| This is the view from the top of the glacier, looking south east towards the Wauwerman Islands where we hope to go to tomorrow. |
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| This is the view looking south west from the top of the glacier, you can see palmer station down in the center of the photo. |
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| Ice bergs, big and blue... |
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| A coupel of cormorants chilling out on the rocks. |
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| Penguins on Torgeson Island getting ready to take a dip. |
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| Elephant seals on Elephant Island, summing themselves after gorging on krill. |
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| Sunset from Palmer Station. |
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| Crabeater Seals ka-noodling on the ice just outside the station. |
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| Josh is checking out our contraption that allow us to collect real-time data on the temperature, salinity and chlorophyll concentrations while we tow an acoustic device that measures krill densities in the water below our zodiac. |
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| This is the contraption underwater. |
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| This is the acoustic pinger and it's tow body, it looks like a shark is following our boat. |
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| Our zodiac, "Ms. Chippy," with Josh and Kim waiving to me as I come alongside. |
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| Tina and Shelly dropped me off after we recovered this underwater glider. |
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| I'm watching out for icebergs here. The coast is clear... |
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| Dave, the boating coordinator demonstrates how to drive in brash ice. |
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| This is the landing area on the Joubin Islands, we took three boats out here for safety, it was about a 1 hour trip from the station |
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| The set up for our electronics on the Joubin Islands. |
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| The birds really do a number on the limpets. |
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| The crew waits around while Josh and I collect all the data. |
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| This is the way we hauled gear up to the radar site on Joubin Island. |
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| More boating in the brash ice. |
