Day 5 -Not Yet GroundHog Day - Another Day on the Aurora Australis. Some variation

I slept slightly in today. Instead of heading down to the F-Deck for my morning Yoga routine I went straight to breakfast. The reason for this a couple of other people have been talking about Yoga and though a 9:30 Yoga session was put up. Always better to go with the crowd I thought. Yoga was followed by Zumba, though not by me. After having finished with my exercise routine I headed back to my tropical Island the E-deck conference room and tended to my loved AWS instrumentation. For some reason I still have no clue the battery I used had been dropping out twice since I set things up. Well hands on, ten AA batteries in a case with wires and there we go. A self-made battery back-up – and it works. All stations – Wind, Temperature, Relative Humidity and atmospheric Pressure are reporting functionality. Now onward to the second system. Taking off the wires, packing the first one up and unwrapping the second logger, the second, wind, temperature and pressure sensor. Reprogramming the logger, wires all up and program submitted. Reports are coming back – Room Temperature – 29.44 C and Relative Humidity 14.74 %. Sounds like a desert. Almost the right direction we are heading. Though - I always thought Antarctica was dry and cold not dry and hot. Well I guess I always wanted to be heading for Hawaii or would Alice Springs be more appropriate to say. In any case nor freezing problem today - aside from outside.

Having unpacked the batteries – I continued with setting up the battery chargers and recharging of our stock of rechargeables. Another box ticked on my list of things to do.

Where was lunch again or is it already time for dinner. It was certainly time again for some fresh air. Put on the down jacket- up the stairs and out the door onto the deck. Nice brisk air is greeting me. The swell is low, the water deep blue with very few white caps. Almost no wind and the snowflakes are dancing. A great day to be on deck. A great day to shoot some pictures. Sea-birdies where are you. Sea-birds are magnificent sailors and always quick providing a challenge to the auto zoom. Today with the snowflakes the auto zoom got another challenge – dancing flakes in front of the lens and I even was able to capture some mid-air. Nice work.

Dancing Snow Flakes

The evening I spent some time on finally sorting through the tons of pictures I have taken. With Picasa not wanting to cooperate with handling the large RAW files I am working now on the JPG versions leaving the great picture handling for later when I have internet access again and purchase and can download appropriate software. So the evening until very late was spent with

delete – next picture: delete – good picture: zoom in not completely sharp so delete – next picture: random shot: petrel with half of the back of the ship, waves in the foreground sharp … Well you may imagine how that went. At the end I sorted out a bunch of great shots and put all the pictures of people into an album.  Yeah Done

One of "Those" Shots

And Another Delete - "stop no this one goes in as an example" Picture

With this said off to dinner, once again. Almost forgot yet to wait for another hour as we turned back the clock an hour last night.