Happy holidays everyone.

Making Ginger Beer

One of the things that I enjoy about being at Palmer Station is the fact that we have use of the kitchen. On our Sunday day off the cooks have a well deserved rest day as well and so everyone has to fend for themselves. This is not as bad as it sounds, because we have Deborah Joe. Who is she? She is our leftover fridge which holds the week’s leftovers, or whatever you’ve set aside for yourself. All is well labeled with the name of the contents and the use-by date. If you’ve completed the little food safety course which is intended to make sure that you know the basics on how to handle food and knives, you are also allowed to make your own culinary creations, especially on Sundays.

A couple of Sundays ago we made Ginger beer.  We had a whole bunch of fresh ginger in the walk-in fridge that was in need of being used, because it was starting to go bad.

Lots of grated ginger.

So you take a bunch of ginger (measurements were not taken at this stage, but in general our consensus was that more ginger = better taste) and grate it to a pulp. Put it in a big pot (think 6 gallons) of boiling water. Add a little bit of lemon and lemon zest. Spice it up some more with some ginger powder and add a pound or 2 of honey. After stirring and boiling for a while you run it through a sieve to strain out most of the solids and you let it cool of till 90F, which despite putting it outside on the deck still took a bit of time. At that temperature you add the activated yeast and you are ready for the next step.

Lime zest smells sooo good.

Then we put the pan on an elevation and put a little plastic tube in it and through the wonders of gravity we were able to siphon the contents to our sanitized bottles. The bottles are of the Dutch beer brand called Grolsch which must be loved throughout the world for their caps which allows you to re-use them over and over again.

Bring all the ingredients to a boil.                                   Siphon into the bottles.                         

After leaving the bottles a couple of days at room temperature to let the yeast do their thing, the end product is ready; super nice bubbly, spicy, heart-warming alcohol free ginger beer.

The end product.

 Now it needs to go in the fridge, because we don’t want the process to continue and we don’t want any exploding bottles.

The empty bottles look nice as well.

Palmer Station season 3

Again it has been a while since I've written anything on our blog, but that will change. Since this blog now has competition form Sheri's individual blog, I'll be forced to write or be forgotten :-).
While Sheri is out gallivanting on the South Georgia Islands, I have returned for my third season at Palmer Station. What's not to like about a small population with great colleagues, being incredibly close to the actual science that's being done, a climate that's not too bad** and proximity to wild life.

My trip of Toulouse - London - Dallas - Denver met with remarkably little inconvenience. A couple of days of training and indoctrination at our headquarters in Denver and then onwards to Santiago where our good luck ran out and we hit some extra hours of delay on our way towards Punta Arenas but that was later compensated by the airlines with some extra air miles.
The 4 days on our vessel the LMG were considerably less sea sickness inducing than the extreme weather that was predicted for us.

Beautiful pancake ice.

I'm always awed by the birds that make the ocean their home; flying so
effortlessly a couple of inches above the waves.

 

Many of us are needed to do the line handling for the ship.

 








 I guess the copious amounts of candied ginger that we bought before we left Punta Arenas was not needed all that much to prevent seasickness, but tasty nonetheless.
 Apart from decent weather we even got treated to a short sighting of 4 orca's (killer whales sounds more impressive).  We seldom see them from Palmer (last season was the first time in a decade that my colleague has seen them), so we were all really excited. Sorry no picture of that because I decided to just look at them.

After arriving at Palmer Station there was a truly frantic period of 6 days of turnover, in which the departing winter-over crew -apart from making their travel plans, cleaning their rooms and packing their bags- try to teach their summer colleagues the ropes of the job (which in the case of us returning folks is much easier than for colleagues that are totally new to the program and  station) and the Logistics department tries to unload all the cargo from the ship (there will be station-wide calls for volunteers to help unload the fresh goods that need to be transferred to the fridge rapidly) and all the emergency teams (like fire fighters and Ocean  Search and Rescue and Glacier Search and Rescue teams) do their turnovers and declare the incoming folks to be responsible from now on. Oh I should not forget the fact that we do a fire drill, in which we get fully dressed in our gear and rescue someone from a "burning" building.

Anyway you get the idea about starting a new season here. Last year's experience seems to repeat itself by the surrounding sea-ice not wanting to relinquish its grip in favor of open water. We are now a couple of months into our season and cannot seem to get rid of the sea ice surrounding us.

Just a reminder of where Palmer is situated and showing Sheri's location

 Let me explain. Palmer Station is surrounded by water which explains why so many marine biologists come here to do their studies, but a majority of that science is done from little rubber boats (Zodiacs) that leave from our station and cannot navigate too well in ice. The other part is done from from our research and supply vessel the LMG.

An image from our webcam; surrounded by ice.

Our webcams can be found here: http://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/palWebCam.cfm

The New Adventure Begins

The latest and greatest (?) adventure - South Georgia Island

Today is the first step on the way to South Georgia Island.  After weeks of preparation, in just a couple of hours, the house will be winterized and I'll decamp to a friend's house in Toulouse for the evening.

Leaving for six months isn't new but packing for six months to go to a place without a shop of any kind IS.  For the first time, I've had to pack all of my toiletries.  Two months ago, I started keeping tally of the feminine hygiene supplies used each month.  Two days ago, I counted out and bagged all of the tampons and pads I might need for the months ahead.  It's great to be a woman!

Here's the pile before it made it into the baggage (minus a super pair of Muck waterproof/insulated boots that are waiting for me in England):

It fits!

Here is the clean, mouse-proof and winterized house.

Sunroom

Living Room

Bedroom

Kitchen

Tomorrow morning, I'll fly from Toulouse to London Heathrow, where I'll be met by my newest buddy and future colleague, Rachel.  She'll take me back to her place near Cambridge for the day and I'm certain that we will find and devour our last authentic ethnic food for a long while.  

In the evening, her boyfriend will drive us to Brize Norton Royal Air Force Base and we'll board the Airbus Voyager for the 19 hour flight to the Falkland Islands.

I hope that I'll be able to keep up this blog throughout the 6 months.  It all depends on the internet speed and bandwidth.  Please let me know that you're reading by leaving comments.  I love to hear from readers. 

A whale of a day.

Wow, I can't believe that it has been a year and a half since we've written anything on our blog. However, I am here to break that silence.

This year is my second year of working at Palmer Station and the second year without Sheri at my side. She will not be working for the United States Antarctic Program this time, but is experiencing what it is like to spend the winter in our home in France - finding out for us if our newly renovated and insulated roof makes enough of a difference that our little wood stove can keep up with winter temperatures.

I think I wrote in a previous post about the fact that almost all of our Palmer science is marine-based and done with the aid of the inflatable Zodiac boats that we have. When the weather is good enough, we can take a boat and go recreational boating (rec boating) as long as we stay within our boating limit (approx. 2 miles) and within boating hours (which end 1 hour before sunset).

During this time of year the amount of krill (which are on the menu of most animals here) is booming which is not only good news for the penguins feeding their chicks, but also brings in Minke and Humpback whales.

Yesterday all day long we had been able to see from our big windows in the galley the occasional tell tale spout in the distance, but after dinner there seemed to be a bigger than usual number so we jumped in our boat a drove towards them.

Our efforts were rewarded when in the distance we saw the majestic sight of a whale breaching. Normally we only see them spouting their plumes of water vapor in the air followed by their tail flukes when they dive below the water surface, so I felt immensely grateful that we had found a breaching whale and were looking in the right direction. Over the course of the next couple of hours we were treated to the sight of a very young Humpback who seemed so happy with life that all he wanted to do was breach. There were some 5 or 6 adults in our neighborhood and then some more scattered over the landscape. We never had to wait very long to see a fluke or a breach or a sideways show of the dorsal fin.

The animals near us we're clearly practicing a hunting technique called bubble feeding in which they form a kind of formation under water and by releasing air make a "net" of bubbles that drives the krill together and to the surface. This resulted not only in the whales spending a lot of time at the surface, but also announcing their location by making all the bubbles in the water. It was so incredible to see these huge animals from so nearby (while still trying to keep a safe distance) and hear and smell their breath. I can easily say that this was one of the most unforgettable moments in my Antarctic career which makes being away from Sheri and family a bit easier to bear. Let's hope there will more of these majestic moments but hopefully together with Sheri.