Another January 10th, 2005

And of course, that day had to be a real blower. I was tucked into a niche towards the rear deck out of the worst of the wind, one leg jambing my body against the metal, but the misty air was curling around the welded corner and there was still a chill in it, even if it was weaker than the blast on the walkway. I stuck my head out into it briefly and scanned the water to the stern. Nothing. I shot back into my cubby hole.

We were about a mile from the edge of the ice pack, beam on and rolling pretty badly, but I was facing out to sea, to the North. The sub had surfaced; we had recieved the acknowledgement to our final signal an hour before, and she should be in the area. We weren't able to pinpoint her, which was why I was standing out there in ridiculous temperatures with a pair of binoculars made useless by the motion of the ship, and every item of clothing I could manage to pull on.

The first set of readouts we got when she came out of the heavy flow told us that something had gone wrong with one of the cell packs; she was low on power, and we had brought her up on reserves and then after that just blown her tanks and hoped for the best. She was a bright tulip yellow. It was going to be old fashioned eyes and shipwork to get her on board again, and with the visibility we had, the wind and the rolling of the ship, it was going to be a real barrel of laughs. It had to be now, too. In this weather she would drift, and a fifteen-foot long GRP shell packed with instruments makes for expensive flotsam. The only thing I was happy about was that the IRS Yuri Gringiyev didn't have a crow's nest.

It was fucking cold, and my gloves were crap.
Someone knocked on the wall behind my head. Gits, I thought, they know I'm out here. Then the Yuri began to wheel around and I knew someone had spotted her, and just as I realised the wind hit me full on and shocked the breath out of me. I closed my mouth and pulled my coat collar closed over my lower face. I abandoned my bolthole and caught the rail, latching my safety line onto the runner which picks its way around the stern of the ship, and staggered inelegantly around to starboard. Rani and Mike were there, bundled up as much as I was so I could only identify them because I know whose clothes were whose. Rani pointed, and I saw the yellow hull of Ringa about two hundred metres away, very low in the water. We nicknamed her Ringa because, well, boats and submarines are feminine, and Ringa, because that's a female version of Ringo, I suppose, but we'd had all the yellow submarine jokes we could stomach by that point.

"Can we use the davits?" I yelled, in the vicinity of where I guessed Rani's ear was. She shrugged. She was a veteran of these sorts of expeditions, a paid-up member of the university staff and working on a long postdoctoral project which had her penned in for another summer's voyage the following year. I didn't envy her in the slightest. This trip to Antarctica had started out being something of a romantic idea, but the first crimp of reality had been the dates - flying to the Chilean base in the South Shetlands in mid-November for training, and then sailing on the 3rd of December, returning, if everything went to schedule, (and it never does) on January the 20th. The rest of reality had come out of its corner swinging in quick succession with the first Antarctic Summer Storm and the first cup of coffee on the morning after we left port. The stuff was bought locally by one of the staff at the Chilean research station, and it was dire.

I was seasick for the first time in my life two days out, and only really got over it three days after that. I brought three textbooks and five or six papers to look over, and one fat novel bought at the last minute at Heathrow. The novel was a terribly written fantasy dirge, but I was ridiculously hot on my fluid mechanics. Apart from a little rudimentary preparation for Ringa, study was all I had to do. A couple of other, bigger projects on board took up most of the linkup time, so checking of personal email and other communications took a back seat, and, distressingly, I was the weakest chess player on board so no one wanted to play me. If it had been anything but a research ship I'm sure it would have been the other way around.

As soon as we got the data off Ringa, I would have plenty to do. Data extraction, analysis and the first stages of interpretation would take up a lot of my time until we got back to the islands, and to be honest I was looking forward to it. It was a big thing, a big departure from my first degree, but more in the vein of my ambitions - a big question. The world's oceans effect a vast pull on the world's climate, and the oceanic thermal conveyors brought rain, drought, famine or flood to different parts of the world. Understanding the powerhouse of these conveyors would lead to a great step forward in mitigation of their effects through prior warning, and one theory was that the great bowls under the Antarctic ice sheets, with their seasonal salinities, epic rising and falling flows and temperatures, might have something to do with it.

Ringa had just been on a little trip, and now she was going to tell me all about it. The Yuri was manoeuvring, labouring heavily in the swell.

Christmas had been a bit of a bitch. There had been the emotional call home on the radiophone, but apart from that things had been pretty grim. There's an old political map on the wall in the mess room which has most of the areas around here worn away by prodding fingers so that you can see the grey of the cardboard behind, and on most days, that might as well be accurate.

We're ten days into 2005, and I can't wait to get off this ship. Ten days to go, followed by another two years of sorting the results back at the university. I know it's important work, but...

Another March 29th, 2003

After the trip to Manchester, I got a call from the board at the university saying that I had been one of just two applicants, and they had really enjoyed the interview and they're offering me the PhD! So, looks like I'm heading for Antarctica by way of Manchester. All donations of warm clothing greatly appreciated.