Alongside at Halley

The ship is now moored alongside at N9, this is a low piece of shelf that we moor alongside if we have particularly heavy cargoes to discharge or load. This call the heavy cargo is fuel, 50 tonnes of it.

When the ship is tied up to the ice, it is strictly still at sea so the the bridge has to be manned as such i.e. with qualified deck officer. For the next three weeks, all the deck officers are on 12 hour watches because we will be encountering heavy ice and this allows two officers on the bridge at any one time. Tonight it is me on the bridge alone, checking the moorings, looking out for rogue bergs that may float towards the vessel and maintaining the thrusters (we use the thrusters here continuously to keep the ship alongside.

Weather conditions tonight- ground temp -12°C Force 4 offshore wind.

We will be leaving N9 in the next couple of days and heading towards the Ronne Ice shelf, although there is almost 300miles of thick ice so we still don't know if it will be possible to get there. The purpose of it is to meet up with three warm water drill teams and give them more supplies, part of one of the teams is actually the iStar project which I was involved in two years ago. The hot water drilling is part of a number of science projects, mainly drilling into subglacial lakes.