As you may have already read in other journal entries from this young season, one of the most important things down here is being able to adjust, both mentally and operationally, to unexpected and often unwelcome turns of events.

We awoke early on Halloween morning in the picturesque Neumayer Channel. It is a narrow passage between the east side Anvers Island and neighboring Wiencke Island. Palmer is on the southwest corner of Anvers Island and we were expecting to pass threw the Neumayer, around the south side of Anvers, and then hopefully be at Palmer Station by lunch. We knew that there was a lot of sea ice near Palmer and we passed into it about the time we were leaving the Neumayer and turning east along the south side of Anvers.

Our ship, the L.M. Gould, is an ice-strengthened ship capable of breaking through sea ice at the levels we were expecting to encounter. The way the Gould breaks through heavy sea ice is to ram into it until her momentum is stopped. Then she backs up into the channel she’s just opened, stops, and then runs full steam ahead through that channel to gain momentum before ramming into the ice again. The crew calls it the “back n’ ram.”

We started doing that about 9 a.m. or so. Initially we were making reasonable headway and we thought that we might be into Palmer after lunch. But the further and further into the pack ice we got, the rougher it was to make progress. There was a lot of wet snow on top of the ice that increased the friction on the sides of the ship as we pushed through.

Between 2 and 5:30 p.m., we only progressed three tenths of a mile. With the weather looking like the winds might come up and pack the ice in even tighter, the captain decided to turn around and head back to open water in the Neumayer Channel. We were only about 4 miles or so from the station but it might as well have been a million. There were a lot of disappointed folks on the ship, myself included. And since the ship was to pick up about a dozen folks on station and take them home, no doubt we had company. But everyone has to figure out some way to make the best of it.

Right now, we don’t know when we’ll get to Palmer Station. Our sister ship, the Nathaniel B. Palmer is due into Palmer Station in about 2 weeks. That is the ship that Jim McClintock is coming down on. We were expecting to be at Palmer before Jim, but it now looks like we may get there together. The N.B. Palmer is bigger than the Gould and is not just ice strengthened but an ice breaker, meaning that she can go through even thicker ice than the Gould (although she just spent several weeks trapped in really heavy ice further south). So, the decision has been made for us to wait in open water for a strong wind to loosen the ice near the Station or for the N.B. Palmer to come down and break a channel into the station, whichever happens first. But that means it may be nearly two weeks before we get to the station.

In the original plan, after the Gould dropped us off at Palmer Station and picked up the folks going home, she was to make a call at a small U.S. research outpost to drop off supplies. The outpost is on King George Island, about a day’s sail north of Palmer, and is used by folks who study the abundant and diverse penguin nesting communities there. So we headed there yesterday and made the drop this morning. The winds were howling and the surf was pretty heavy, so unfortunately we weren’t able to go ashore for a visit. Three of the science support crew ferried the supplies in by zodiac in what was clearly a wild ride and clearly wasn’t a day for social calls.

After that, we headed back south in the direction of Palmer Station, but we aren’t going that far just yet. Gotta make the best of the cards we’ve been dealt. NSF has authorized our group to dive off the Gould, using Zodiacs pretty much just as we would in open water at Palmer. We have stopped for the night at Deception Island, a flooded caldera of a volcano that has erupted as recently as 1969 (destroying a Chilean station and severely damaging a British one). The interior is called Port Foster and is about 5 miles long and 3 miles wide. We sailed through Neptune's Bellows, a single, narrow opening from the sea into the crater about 8 p.m. this evening.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, we’ll make our first dives of the trip. Those will be check out dives to make sure that all our gear is working normally and we plan to do it along sloping beach in front of the ruins of an old whaling station.

More about our dives and Deception Island in future journal entries....