Day 21 – 27th August

Today we cruised north from the mooring line in Norwegian Bay where we spent the day drifting with the ice. The day was dominated by the ice work and very little, if not none, ocean work got done. Justin and Ben made a couple of flights with their bird whilst Michelle, Carl and Richard spent the whole day out on the floes. They deployed their second thermistor chain which they were all quite pleased about.

After yesterday’s mishap with the data and ODV, I spent the majority of the day uploading the remaining 25% of the data, whilst making copious backup copies!! Otherwise the rest of the day was spent analysing more of the CTD data and writing a couple of new matlab programs for different things.

As today was Thursday it was also the weekly Larsen BBQ your own steak night. Come dinner time, you head out onto the deck were you can pick out of the meat vat and cook, the largest piece of steak you have even seen. Of course it is the Larsen so if you are feeling extra peckish you can also cook yourself a pork chop! BBQing in minus temperatures with sea ice and glaciers streaming past in the background is a very surreal experience. However one definitely not to be missed!

After the ice teams returned to the boat, the plan was to loop round the north of Devon Island into Penny Strait to pick up the next mooring 50 miles away. However the ice was far too thick for the boat to even consider breaking through so we had to turn around. What had been a 50 mile cruise promptly turned into a 600 mile 2.5 day cruise back into Jones Sound to Baffin Bay were we headed south and west into Lancaster Sound before turning north again at the south west tip of Devon Island back into the other end Penny Strait. It’s kinda hard to explain so have a look at the ships track on the website I linked to in the ‘Precursor to the Arctic’ Post.