Thursday, November 8, 2012

Another beautiful day in Antarctica. So that meant another amazing day of fishing! The wind was blowing like crazy and we tried as hard as we could to prevent the fish from snap freezing in the air. They can die from the extreme cold just from being transferred from the fishing hole to our coolers! Also, we were catching a lot of Trematomus newnesi on Thursday. This species is the least tolerant of temperature fluctuations out of any that we catch so we wanted to be extra careful. We brought out two people from town again. Morgan and Mat. Here we all are fishing, with our backs to the crazy wind.

Morgan had never been fishing in her life. So I taught her how to use the reel, how to jig for fish and showed her how to set the hook. She was so so so excited when she caught her first fish!

We  stopped fishing pretty quickly since we had caught 24 fish in 30 minutes! We were pretty stoked so I did some hand stands to celebrate and Morgan and I did some cartwheels as well. Mt. Erebus makes a great background for amateur gymnastics on the sea ice in Antarctica!

We had an awesome day fishing. And when were were all done, Morgan had a great time checking out the touch tank in Crary. She really liked the sea spiders but was pretty hesitant to touch the giant isopod. She said it looked like a giant cockroach (which it totally does). She was a trooper and did it anyway. While today was super cold and incredibly windy, we caught a lot of fish in a very short amount of time. And like I've said before, any day you are out fishing, it is a great day!