Tuesday October 11, 2001

Well, if any of you were thinking happy (cold) thoughts for us, it might be working! For most of the time that we have been here, the weather has been almost warm. It has rarely been below 0 Fahrenheit. However, this morning, it was -6 and -22 Fahrenheit with the wind chill. Keep those cold thoughts coming! We need the ice to heal. Yesterday, there was a small crack that we would have had to detour around during our “commute” to our last available fishing sites. Today, that crack spread all the way across the sound. We can no longer access our most idea fishing sites by light vehicle. That means that we will almost certainly be flying in helicopters to get access to our sites which is a blessing and a curse because while it will be amazing to fly in the helos, we won’t have the independence we could have had with snowmobiles or our Pisten Bully. So for most of the day today, we continued to get our lab ready. It is quite a small space compared to our lab back home in Portland. However, we will certainly manage. After a long day of lab setup, we decided to go fishing. With the weather as bad as it was, we really needed to bundle up. Here is Sandwich getting on her second layer of long underwear and a second pair of socks. 

We Brad, Sandwich and I took the Pisten Bully (PB) out to go fishing. I wanted to get some pictures of us driving and riding in the PB but we were in a bit of a time crunch. Here we are in our fish hut again. We caught 4 more of the species Trematomus bernacchii (pronounced Trem-uh-toe-mus burn-ack-ee-I). We call them "Bernies" for short. We also were able to catch a very small Pagothenia borchgrevinki (Pag-o-thin-ee-uh bork-gra-vin-key). We call them "Borks" for short. The pictures of the first fish we caught were of "Bernies." I didn't get a picture of the little "Bork" we caught, but another team caught an adult "Bork." It is the white colored fish below. I didn't catch any fish with the Barbie pole...but I won't loose hope. She did great last year!

I have Happy Campers camp tomorrow. I will be learning survival skills and spending a night sleeping outside! I wanted to pack in as many calories as I could so I had a massive dinner and took a large dessert to go. Then I went back to the lab to finish up my work as I won't be back to it until late on Thursday night. Here are a few pictures of me working in the lab and taking a little break to eat my dessert. I won't be posting for a few days, but rest assured, I will take as many pictures at Happy Campers camp as my batteries will allow!