Palmer Day Four - Experiments Away

I didn't sleep too much last night because of my ambitious 24-hour day/night experiment.  Basically I took samples at 3AM, then every 3 hours until 6 PM.  But more on that later.  Surprisingly I wasn't more tired when I started working.  I guess that's the thrill of experimentation?

I brought all my stuff to Palmer Station today to work on my manuscript for the Gulf of Mexico study while they refueled the ship.  Since they had to run the fuel line over the gangway, we were basically confined to either the ship or the station.  Since I was doing sampling here, I stuck to the station and got to work.

The first major challenge of the day came when my sampling bottle broke.  Somehow or another the handle popped off, and then the "firing mechanism" that captured water popped out, leaving a hole in the bottle.  I was pretty upset about it, especially since I borrowed the bottle from the station and they had been so nice helping me get things.  They assured me that it was fine - these were old bottles and they had just gotten more money to order newer ones.  So I grabbed another one and sampled some more.

Since I was "trapped" at Palmer today, I got to eat lunch in their galley instead of the ship.  I almost wish I hadn't.  Lunch was AMAZING.  Seriously.  Ship food, which is usually decent, is now borderline inedible.  It's very obvious they cook to keep people down here happy, which I've said before with the pizza, but this lunch was ridiculously good.  We had french onion soup with homemade croutons, stuffed eggplant, roasted potatoes that were fantastic, Italian seasoned baked chicken with a mushroom-leek gravy, and to top it off - homemade eclairs for dessert.  YUM.  Now I know for sure that I could eat here...it's a shame I probably won't get another meal on station.  :(

After lunch I got some more work done, and when they finished fueling I scrambled over to break down one of my experiments I'd set up last week while coming into station.  It was kind of a bummer, though - while I was in the lab a bunch of the technicians on the ship took a boat out to the islands to look for penguins and I got left behind.  That put a damper on my day.  And then I got out to go sample at 3PM, when the sun was *actually* shining (yay! that's what I needed for my experiment!) and...guess what?  The new bottle broke again!!  This time I saw it happen.  When I dropped the weight to "fire the bottle" and collect the sample, it hit the bottle so hard it ripped off the piston, tearing a hole in the bottle.  It was awful.

So I took the bottle, sad face on, to the instrument tech again and he was quite puzzled.  He said it was fine but maybe the weight was too heavy?  So he rigged up the bottle with a pin I could pull using a different line and no weight for my last sample, and that worked fine.  Thank goodness that experiment's done!  Hopefully I'll get good results, but like most field work, I won't know until I'm back at UGA.

Dinner was sad compared to lunch, but they did have homemade carrot cake (my favorite!) and it was delicious.  Since it was such a clear evening, a bunch of us went up on the deck of the ship to see the sunset.  Let me tell you...it was beautiful.  Actually, I'll just leave you with pictures of it.  I'm sad I didn't try to see more of them, but then again most days it has been overcast so it would not have looked this amazing.