Week 1: M 2 Dec 2019, evening. Aboard the Laurence M. Gould near the Atlantic entrance to the Straits of Magellan

The time was just before 01:00 when Laura informed me that I had 3 minutes before she wanted us to leave the hotel bar of the Cabo de Hornos and head to our new beds aboard the Laurence M. Gould. After a fantastic lamb dinner, we’d walked to Plaza de Armas to touch the foot of the statue to ensure that we’d return to Punta Arenas. From there we’d walked to the lobby bar of the classier hotel in town to use its superior internet and have a final drink. With a scheduled 09:00 departure from the pier in the morning, we’d moved out of our hotel after dinner and yet weren’t quite ready to be confined to the ship and limited internet.

Before any time at all had gone by from my 3 minute warning, Laura was holding up 2 fingers and announcing, “Two minutes!”

What was I doing? Frantically trying to caption pictures of my Easter Island trip for an album. Except in classic form, the internet was letting me down and wouldn’t let me actually post the album. The post button was not clickable.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that studying penguins in Antarctica is the dream for many field technicians like me. The entertaining antics of penguins and fur seal pups is incredible, and I wish I could share videos of the utterly ridiculous moments I’ve experienced around wildlife. Our camp is a little haven on the northern cape of an island that sits below the Drake Passage. Being away from news, the internet, and society is all so refreshing.

I love it, and yet before anyone gets the idea that life is all rainbows and butterflies down there, let me share the downsides for disenchantment…

1. Before leaving Punta Arenas, we have to make sure auto-pay is set up, leave family members with our resumes, cancel subscriptions, set up automatic email responses, etc. Living without internet is great, but disconnecting takes some advance planning.

2. Seasonal lives consist of unpacking, repacking, and living out of dry bags, duffels, or storage totes. Earlier this fall when I finally returned to Fairbanks and saw the duffel I’d sent in the sea shipment from Punta Arenas, I didn’t even bother unpacking because I knew I’d be packing the same items within the next month and a half. Once we’re at camp in Antarctica, we’ll empty our dry bags into clear storage totes that go under our bunks.

3. The four of us contractors for NOAA have bunks inside the main cabin, which has no doors to separate sleeping quarters from the cooking/dining/office/living area. We each have a bunk with a sheet to hang as a privacy curtain, and that’s it. Having our own hotel rooms at the beginning and end of the season is a luxury because we’ve had no personal space for months. At the same time, it’s bizarre to not know exactly where everyone is when we’re in town.

4. As I stood in the shower before checking out of my hotel the other night, I said, “No. No, I don’t want it to end!” The constant stream of a hot shower is something we’ll miss until our return to the ship and land in March. In camp we boil a huge pot of water and combine it with cool water until we find the right temperature in a 5 gallon bucket. The hose of a shower pump gets fed into the bucket, and then we manually control the tempo of water spray in the shower stall. It’s a great set-up for a field shower, but the water always runs out too quickly.

5. Once we arrive at Cape Shirreff, we won’t have a day off until we’ve moved back onto the ship in mid-March. If we want to shower or do laundry, it’s in the evening when we’re back in camp after being out all day. We’ll try to keep our work shorter on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, but there’s no full-blown all day relaxing.

6. In the same vein, we won’t sleep in later than 9:00 until our return to the ship. We wake up shortly before 8:00 six days a week and are allowed to sleep in until 9:00 on Sundays.

7. Although we wash laundry at the Cape, we do so in a 5 gallon bucket with a laundry plunger for agitation. The color of the wash water is always disturbing. Heating water, washing, rinsing, and hanging all take valuable time at the end of the day, so laundry tends to suffer a little. Nothing is truly clean until it gets washed on the ship.

8. Our outhouse has separate holes for number 1 and number 2; we even have cushioned toilet seats and covers! The truth remains that the buckets need dumping over the course of the season. It used to be that the first person to go in the morning would have to shovel the path clear.

9. I can’t keep up with sports while we’re in camp. A 10-page New York Times digest gets emailed to us every day, but sports are only the last 2 pages. Unfortunately, half the time the NYT wastes half a page with a cruise advertisement or a useless story about the history of one team’s shoes. It doesn’t even cover all the major scores.

10. While there are plenty of fur seal puppies, our camp has no canine puppies. The agony!!

That all being said, I’m excited to be headed south again! As long as I save pictures of puppies and a certain Minnesota Viking to my computer, I’ll be quite content in the land of penguins.