Last week Thursday I flew to Longyearbyen on Svalbard. As Tromsø is already at 69.64N and Longyearbyen is at 78.22N, the flight is only 1.5 hours and on a regular Boeing 737-800. And it is actually very affordable, especially in comparison to a similar flight in Canada.
I spent Thursday and Friday helping Paul and Matts with setting up an automated water sampler.
The water sampler is programmed to collect a bottle of water each week for an entire year. It only collects water from the depth it sits at. You could also use this sampler to collect water from different depths if you were to raise and lower it.
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| Top down view of the water sampler. Each of the blue caps is the top of a bottle that gets filled. |
On Friday afternoon, most of the other cruise participants arrived. I helped Matts and Gunnar with finding, repacking and sorting the sea ice equipment. Friday night we had the cruise dinner so that everyone (or most people) could meet and start getting to know each other.
I ate dinner with everyone and then went for a few drinks with a friend, the helicopter pilot who flew the me and the EM-bird on R/V Lance in 2010. It was a bit of a late night for me but was nice to see him and catch up.
On Saturday we had shooting practice and a bit of polar bear safety theory. Then spent a bit more time sorting out things and shopping to pick up some junk food and drinks for on the boat.
On Sunday morning everyone was at the ship at 9am. We had a quick safety/operations meeting with the First Mate and stuff was moved around the ship a bit (brought some things up from below, put other things down). I started putting the bird together. We started sailing around mid-afternoon, something like 3pm.
On Sunday night we were to drop off a group of 6 geologists onto Prince Karls Forland, a long island in Svalbard. However, large waves and strong winds meant that we could not really use the helicopter from the ocean side of the island, so the ship had to circle around. The weather deteriorated and soon using a helicopter did not seem like an option. When I went to sleep at 11pm, the helicopter was going to do a test flight, otherwise they were considering using small zodiacs to get the geologists and all their gear onto the island. In the end, it was decided just to wait a few more hours as the weather was improving. By about 5:30am the geologists and their gear were all off the ship.
We then began heading to the first oceanographic mooring. A mooring refers to an anchor and rope and in the case of scientists a suite of sensors attached to the mooring. NPI has maintained a series of moorings across Fram Strait for many years now. Each year the Fram Strait cruise heads out to go to the moorings, bring them up, collect the data, service or replace the instruments and then redeploy the mooring.
Now, if you have been following my blog for its entirety you may remember that I get seasick, and I get seasick very very easily, I mean, very very easily. This time was no different, while heading to the mooring the wind was up a bit and the waves for a few meters, more than I could handle, so I just took a motion sickness pill, no big deal. I find they leave me pretty drowsy, and I still can't look at a screen or read a book. Since we had already put some of the EM bird equipment together and the sea ice equipment was largely ready to go, I decided to kill the time by sleeping, something made easier by the motion sickness pills. I slept all Sunday night, most of Monday (getting up only for meals) and all of Monday night.
On Tuesday there was a bit more work to do putting together the bird (attaching the tail and putting the two halves together), and a bit more sorting of sea ice equipment. We finally reached the ice and it was starting to look like we could do a sea ice station and maybe an EM bird flight. Unfortunately, our pilot was not feeling well. The first mooring was found and retrieved and we started heading to the second one, hoping that when we got there the pilot would be feeling better and we could do a sea ice station and flight after the second mooring was recovered.
Our pilot did not get better, and the ship didn't make it to the second mooring. Basically the ship clutch was damaged and after some discussions it was decided that the ship needed to return to Longyearbyen for repairs. The first aid trained people on board thought that the helicopter pilot might have appendicitis and so he was picked up by the rescue helicopter from Longyearbyen.
So we started heading back towards Longyearbyen, I made sure the bird and so forth were securely strapped down. We had supper and watched some movies and then I went to bed.
When I woke up, the sea was a fair bit rougher (6-7m waves, winds 35-40knots gusting to 50knots), so I took a motion sickness pill in preparation and decided again just to sleep the transit day away. Turns out that during the day it was determined that the damage to the ship was more difficult to fix than initially estimated. The ship was now going to go to Longyearbyen to allow people and their equipment off and then it would sail to Tromsø. Anyone who wanted off the boat then had to be ready to go as the ship would arrive at the docks at 7pm and leave at 10pm.
Okay so we packed up all the stuff, and got off the boat. NPI had managed to arrange accommodation for everyone (THANKS, was very nice). A few of us then met up for drinks and some food at around 11pm/midnight. On Thursday I rebooked my flight back to Tromsø.
It was pretty disappointing to go back without having stepped on sea ice or having flown the EM bird. We did manage to collect some ice observations, but that was it for the sea ice team. The oceanography team retrieved that one mooring and performed some conductivity, temperature, depth (pressure) measurements.
I did not even take any pictures, well I took one of the heli deck as we left Longyearbyen but I did it with the Google Blogger app on my phone and accidently deleted the picture before posting it (smooth move).
As I don't get my apartment until Sept 2, I was homeless but luckily Gunnar and his wife Gabrielle have welcomed me into their guest room for the week. It has been really nice staying with them. Gabrielle is an amazing cook and it has been nice to see a new part of Tromsø and to get to know some more people. Because I had left most of my non cruise clothing with Angelika and she was on holidays I needed another pair of pants to wear around so I went shopping on Saturday and bought some stuff so I could make dinner for Gunnar and Gabrielle. I also looked into getting a haircut, I have not had one since before I left Canada and I really need one. But they are crazy expensive here, as in 50-80 for a regular men's haircut! So I will probably wait another week so that it is a bit closer to when Nicole comes to visit.
Yesterday the weather was very nice so we went to do a hike. There is a hiking program here where if you complete the 20 hikes they recommend each summer, you get a prize. You enter you name in a book at the top of the mountain and record a number from the book into your list which you then submit. There are also prizes if you only complete 7, 10, or 15 of the hikes. It was a really nice day and very nice hike from sea level to 850m in about 4 km (though the first 1.25 kilometers was very flat).
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