After a short summer, it's time to go back to work. This year the deployment process was very different and much longer to keep everyone healthy and to ensure that Antarctica would remain COVID free.
Here is the view from my hotel room in San Francisco for the two week quarantine before flight down to Punta Arenas.
Thankfully everyone tested negative (twice) so we were able to get on the charter flight in San Francisco.
There were just over 30 of us on the 24 hour journey from SFO to somewhere in Texas and then all the way down to Punta Arenas.
Our charter flight safely on the ground in PA. We were the only flight in the PA airport and they had customs set up just for us. Very quick process and then onto the bus to go directly to the pier and the waiting vessel.
All bags were cleaned on our way on to the ship. Then we sat in port for two weeks, just to be extra safe.
Neat clouds, good weather. Did lots of laps walking in circles around the ship.
Thanksgiving on the vessel was a nice meal but a fairly low key event.
Four weeks since departing home, we finally get underway, right into some pretty rough weather. We exited the straights of Magellan to the west instead of the normal east route, because the Chilean pilot would only have to come on board for one hour instead of 12 hours.
Last spit of land before we hit the pacific ocean, weather was not great. Seas picked up quickly and everyone hunkered down. We had to head pretty far out into the Pacific to make sure we hit the swells in a less terrible direction.
Green is the route that was plotted, the red is what we actually did.
Land ho! Calm waters at last! This is the first land (Smith Island) we saw after crossing the Drake. This is the same route the Amundsen took when he headed south to start his journey to the South Pole.
Entering the Gerlache Straight at around 2 AM.
This is about as dark as it gets here this time of year.
Beautiful day for passing through the Neumeyer channel.
Little berg was almost in the way of our parking spot.
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