Well, after three weeks of hiking, fishing, camping, driving, flying, sailing, diving and eating in New Zealand and Australia I've made it home to Hawaii. I would absolutely recommend New Zealand to anyone who like Alaska or Hawaii, since it is a perfect hybrid of the two places.

I'll try to post up some more photos from the trips, they were really a great time.

~G

Hmmm... I wonder who they'll find to hold up the earth after I leave?

~G

Well, today is my last full day in Antarctica. So I slept in, packed up, cleaned and went down by the sea for a final visit. It was very windy, but a beautiful day none-the-less. I watched a couple seals come out from under the ice here and they swam all around investigating me from the water.

It's truly amazing here and I've had a trip of a lifetime. AND... it's not over yet, so stay tuned. I will be sure to put a few posts from New Zealand, the Great Barrier Reef and Hawaii too. Thanks for all the comments, the love, support, letters and boxes of candy, it really meant a lot. So until next time, this is Antarctica Man signing off!

~G

but no, seriously... I'll put up more pictures

I finally stopped by the greenhouse the other day and wow, it's really full of life! It may not look it from the outside, but it's like stepping into a whole new world in there. There's all kinds of lettuce, tomatoes, herbs and even rhubarb. Not to mention, the insane fluorescent light and all of the tinfoil on the walls... it's like a sensory overload.

I've also been spending a lot of time down by the shore at hut point. It's really neat down there, you just never know what you're going to find.



~G

The Mt. Erebus crew (Deb, Burmy and I) met up again last night at the coffee house to drink wine, play crib and talk with a friend of ours (Craig) who just arrived back in town from being weathered in on the mountain for 4 days. We really got a treat, though, because the world's leading volcanologist, Bill McIntosh, whom our friend Craig was "stranded" on the mountain with, happened to show up as well.

So we monopolized his entire evening and picked his brain with all kinds of Erebus questions. We looked through photos and exchanged stories, which he has a lot of, having worked on the mountain for over 30 years. Turns out that in all our hiking, exploring and spelunking, we walked right passed several fumaroles containing chambers with 60 foot high ceilings! Wow! It was probably for the better that we stuck to the 15 footers since the larger ones can be really dangerous. Apparently there are all kinds of caves around the mountain where a repel on a fixed rope of up to 150 feet is required to enter.

It was nice to finally get the straight story on the helicopter crash too. Apparently, in the early 70s this Navy helicopter was taking fresh supplies out to some folks on Byrd Mountain and the passenger on board convinced the pilot to fly up to the top of Erebus, even though it was far beyond the 9,000 foot operational capabilities of the helicopter. They ended up loosing power and taking a hard landing which smashed up the gear.

The two men pitched a tent, which is still buried near by (haha... missed that too) and waited for a rescue (too bad, they didn't find those heated fumaroles). The helicopter blew over that winter and was stripped of parts the next year, even though it still ran okay, which took by surprise the first mechanic who accidentally turned it on while messing around in the cockpit.

~G

I took a walk down to Hut Point today hoping to take some samples from the melt water ponds to dig through under the microscope. Apparently they are loaded with cool organisms. Unfortunately, the ponds were all frozen solid due to the cold temps.

However, I did make it down to the freshly opened intertidal zone (not much for tides here) and found some pretty amazing stuff. The little guy next to my glove is a chaetiliid isopod and by isopod standards... not very "little." They can get up to 8 inches long live 8 years!

I also saw a bunch of these ctenophores or comb jellies that just seemed to be everywhere and so beautiful. The cilia along the little ridges glow with a sort of phosphorescent purple sheen. Truly amazing to watch swim. It brought me back to the good 'ol days of the Spaulding Beach tide pools in Auke Bay.

It was such a lovely day outside and the water just looked too inviting to pass up, so I stripped down and had a quick dip from the beach.

~G

Well, the times are a changin' here in McMurdo and with the advent of a windy night, all the ice is gone! It's pretty amazing to look out over the deep and dark blue water and see a nearly constant display of whale spouts and whitecaps. (If you look closely, you can see the research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer.)

The tanker arrived the other day and thus initiated its deployment of over 7 million gallons of fuel to our little island village. It should be all done tomorrow and then the vessel will come... and with it the infamous.... "offload." Offload is a magical time of year when the town is flooded with a massive Naval workforce and the poor little McMurdonites must work 12 hour shifts every day until the ship leaves. The bars close down to keep a lid on the rowdy out-of-towners and things are just... different. Oh well, no one at the carp shop has to work over time... haha.

Today marks the first day of my last week in Antarctica and I have realized for the first time that I am really going to miss this place. Like being away from Juneau and missing the rain, fishing and my boots, I'll miss the cold, my mittens and the powdered milk.. well, maybe not the powdered milk.

~G

I signed up for the Polar Sea icebreaker
cruise the other day and out of 600 names, I was picked as an alternate. They took two cruises with 200 people on each and luckily, (probably with much thanks to last night's Carp Shop BBQ - pictured here) not many folks showed up at 7:30 in the morning and even though I was pretty far down the list, I was one of the last names called.

(This hungry little skua got plenty to eat)

We left town and steamed out the channel for an hour or so until turning around just before the ice edge. However, we did see plenty of open water within the channel, as well as penguins, seals and even several minke whales. It was so great to be on a boat, to feel the engines rumble and the slow turning and listing of the ship. Not to mention, just staring over the edge and watching all the brash ice peel off to the sides as we cut through at 11 knots was pretty amazing.



I was lucky enough to be up on the fly bridge when the whales went by so we could watch them swim under water and come up for air. Just before seeing the whales, the captain announced that we needed to ram the ice shelf in order to turn around. It was a bit smoother than I thought it would be as we just kind of floated up on top, then sunk through the 17 foot thick ice.

The last picture is from yesterday, when two hovercrafts came near town from a cruise ship that was out in the bay. I watched both of them arrive and noticed that one seemed to have some trouble maneuvering and just didn't really sound right. Turns out it broke down and they had to get some mechanics out to fix it. Apparently the USAP tried hovercrafts for five or six years, but they were simply too problematic and they couldn't figure out how to avoid tearing up the bladder on the sharp ice. They sure would be fun though... the working one looked like it was easily going 50 or 60 miles per hour.

~G