Wednesday 16th January 2013

Today was a good day. I found the problem with the Voyage leaders computer (After the propeller head reconfigured it, he forgot to reboot it for the changes to take effect) so he is happy, I cleaned up a few other Email issues, printed the papers etc, setup a couple of laptops, did some more printing, threw two more moths out the door (Or was it the same one again?), read about this NASA experiment they want us to participate in and by then it was lunch time. There were prawns out today, so I pigged out on them with plenty of salad. The meals out here are very good, but very heavy so I am trying to lay off the heavy and fat things. There is also cherry’s, so I have been pigging out on them too before they are all gone.

I spent all afternoon cleaning up all my music files on my computer. Before leaving home I ripped every CD in the house and now I have about 60Gb of music to catalogue and clean up. That’s going to be a long ongoing project but it will be good once done. We also had a quarantine day and we all had to scrub our boots and vacuum the pockets of all our cloths to avoid contamination of the continent.  Most people seem to be up and about today, so that’s good.

I noticed a few albatross following the ship today. They have a long flight if they want to kick back and give their wings a rest for a while. For dinner I had prawns again and this time I put some yummy mushroom risotto on as well and covered the prawns with salad so it didn’t look like I was eating all the prawns. (Which I was) After dinner I got a cup full of cherries and a coffee and retired to my room to work on my music files till late into the night. I find it very hard to get to sleep out here, but once I am asleep I sleep like a log.

@ 09:00 UTC

Speed 11.25 knots

Heading south west

Roll 6 degree

Pitch 6 degree

Depth 3700 meters

Water temp 11.5 degree

Air temp 10.8 degree

Wind N @ 12.5 knots

Lon 130.9E & Lat 48.3S

 

Here are some pictures of the bridge of the Aurora Australis. The keel was laid in 1988 and the ship was launched in 1990, so that makes it 23 years old, that's why it's a bit out dated now.

 

View looking towards starboard

 

View of the rear navigation area on the bridge

 

View of the port steering console. Mostly this has been my chair during the voyage.

 



Close up of one of the two wing steering consoles. Note the Morse code key !!

 



 

A couple of the guy's taking their watch at the helm. All the Aurora Australis crew have been great to us. We have free run on the bridge except for docking and anchoring and we help out doing ice berg watch.