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Please note that the bulk of this report was written prior to the events of Monday afternoon Feb 22, 2016 (local), which are explained in the last paragraph.

Steaming somewhat more slowly than planned through rough seas and then around to the west to avoid ice, it took us 11 days to transit from Fremantle to our first station. But, it thought well worth it by most of us as at 66.60°S, 78.4°E, we were 0.05° south of the Antarctic Circle. As we made our way into Prydz Bay we were treated to the night skies filled with the Aurora Australis and some beautiful views of icebergs (kept at a safe distance).

Sampling has been busy, but is going well as the CTD watch learns the ropes. There have few glitches other than a couple of short hold ups with the winch, which were quickly dealt with, and the switching of the intake source for the underway measurements first due to bubbles and second due to issues with the pump. Our first SOCCOM float was successfully deployed with all necessary sampling on Sunday night. And our first drifter deployment will be coming up in a few days.

It seem the cooks in the galley are planning on fattening us up before we get back on land as along with wonderful meals, we are constantly tempted with fresh baked bread, muffins, cakes (birthday and otherwise), cookies, croissant, crumbles, and even pavlova for deserts. A couple of nights ago despite of freezing temperatures and the occasional snow shower, we were treated to barbequed steak (cooked outside).

Yesterday, as most of you are already aware, just after noontime, under normal conditions, the rosette was going in when a malfunction of the Cast-6 system caused the wire to part

and the loss our 36-bottle rosette, (seen in the photo above, note the iceberg in the background is not nearly as close at it seems) including all instrumentation in 2200 m of water. To trawl for the rosette with no certainty of success would have required the efforts of many of the same personnel needed to get the spare rosette and alternate winch prepped. Given our previous delays due to weather and ice, it was fairly quickly decided that the best course of action would be to move forward with the science. I am most grateful to have this steadfast crew and science party out here as within less than one shift we had a working rosette with CTD, transmissometer and fluorometer in the water again. Spare chi-pods should go on today. The loss of our specialized fluorometers for the SOCCOM floats will be felt, as will the upward/downward looking pair of LADCPs. We are once again moving steadily northward along the track of the 2007 occupation of I08S. The students are enthusiastically embracing the joys of deck work: hooking the rosette, slipping the lines and learning to tie knots. Our station spacing will likely suffer due to the loss of time and some observations will simply not happen due to the loss of instrumentation,. Nevertheless, the science will not suffer due to a lack of effort.

Coming north,
- Alison and Viviane