My usual routine. Getting up around 7 am, a little bit of
yoga to stretch and wake up followed by breaky. This mornings program aside
from continuing on work is a muster. In a muster everybody on the ship will get
ready for an emergency. In our case, get our Antarctic gear on, take our
survival bag, life jacket and head up to the Heli deck. Arriving up the stairs
to the Heli deck what you can see is a flock of yellow black penguins with the
two head Penguins shouting out names and the named ones concurring.
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| Yellow Penguins on Deck |
The Muster
was over as quickly as it came. It was followed by a BA and medical
familiarization exercise. In the past days the Voyage Leader, Deputy Voyage
Leader together with the ship’s crew, the doctor and our FTO coordinated a kind
of Emergency response team. Out in the middle of nowhere we all on board of the
Aurora have to be at least for some time self-reliant in an emergency. Thus we
are dependent on the skill set on board. Luckily in a bunch like us there are
lots of skill sets available. On one hand because the AAD has trained a number
of us in tasks like fire fighting, lay surgical and everyone has to have I believe
a First Aid cert.. On the other hand many of us are outdoorsy and have their
own interest in all of these activities. I for example are keeping my
Wilderness First Responder training current, which puts me automatically onto
the Medical responder team.
This said.We are more than personnel needed during
the muster exercise and thus I could get back to my computer and toys to sort
out my Automatic Weather Station (AWS) gear. This Antarctic Trip of mine was pulled together with
extremely little notice and time to prepare. On top of the few weeks of notice there were
also a few mishaps occurring. Going to Antarctica always means lots of gear.
One need to be prepared for everything and today once again showed that one
shouldn’t make any assumptions. The AWS gear arrived two days before I had to
have our cargo in. There was just enough time to sort through the gear list and
make sure that everything which should have been in the box according to the
shipping list was actually in the Box. Not that I could have changed anything
as it was only a week to departure. All was there and Tuesday all of it was on
board and I stowed things nicely away for a bumpy ride. Today I unpacked it,
checked the content and started the process of unraveling its secret life.
Aside from receiving the equipment I had in preparation of the trip downloaded
the software, and documentation. In the old days any kind of equipment came
with a printed sheet of the documentation. We are not in the second decade of
the 21st century and thus it seems reasonable that we are living in
an always online world. Just not on the ship. The first thing was that I
couldn’t install my little USB to Serial connector. I installed these dongles a
lot of times on many many many – you see on how many - computers. Never ever I
needed this little CD which often comes with them. This time I received the
following message – the installation of your device is incomplete. Connect to
the internet to download the driver. Thanks I am in the middle of the Southern
Ocean and no ability to download a driver from the internet. Well this is life
in or on the way to Antarctica – always differs from what one expects. What
also is Antarctica is that you can walk up to your fellow Antarctic
Expeditioners and if you speak to the right person – your problem can be
solved. There you go equipped with the right driver from dear Fellow BOM
technician Peter I am tagging along in the late afternoon after having spent
another two hours to successfully find a way to print out the manuals for my instruments.
Around 9 pm – after about 7 hours of preparing it took me a mere half an hour
to wire it up and get things running. With this I finished things off and
shortly headed to LaLa Land.
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