The morning bust forth!

After a couple of sadly cloudy and windy/snowy days, we had the most
magnificent sunrise yesterday morning. As I speak, the sun is making its
way toward the horizon to dawn another day, but alas, no photos of today
yet. Counting and measuring krill from our catch overnight, the view from
our starboard window was breathtaking. Sitting at the mouth of Wilhelmina
Bay, the sun crested, bursting forth a full spectrum of reds, oranges, and
yellows. The residual weather was still rolling over the mountains in a
fast moving misty pattern reminiscent of the epic trek across Antarctica in
"Happy Feet". Okay, maybe not as windy – though the night before
gave us 50 knot wind gusts with over 30 knots sustained. It is not a calm
place here. So many krill were caught last night that I, for one, have no
concept of the numbers. So many krill were in one of the nine nets, that
the sample had to be split in half three times (yielding 1/8th the total
krill volume). It still was a tight fit in our 1 liter plastic jars!

Our tag team has been awesome, tagging whales just about every day they
have left on our Zodiac rubber boats. Unfortunately, the whales were
having just too much fun yesterday, so our tags fell off relatively
quickly. Overnight we surveyed a shallow bay – Charlotte Bay.
Unfortunately, we were unable to survey the entire bay due to large
icebergs jutting some 4-6 ft above the water surface in solid ice. The
radar, to my untrained eye, looked treacherous at best. We were able to
map the bottom surface using our acoustic instrumentation along the way and
produced new data.

As a side note, the "Happy Feet" reference really came about because we
watched it tonight. Fun movie if you don't mind the inaccurate portrayal
of tap dancing penguins. They obviously can't produce a real tap without
the proper footwear, yet all the penguins in the movie were shoeless.
Notice: no penguin feet were frostbitten during the filming of this moving.

Also, I was eliminated from the ship ping pong tournament today. Note to
self: never underestimate National Geographic Videographers' ping pong
skills.

-E