A New Year!

 Well, I know it's been a while since our last post, so I will try and condense down the past two weeks into a single post. Everything is still going well here aboard the Peary. As I write this post, we are continuing our journey to Antarctica and should arrive there on January 26. We should begin to see ice sometime in the next 6 to 10 days. The sunset is getting later and later, and pretty soon it just won't set at all. But until then, it is still a pretty awesome sight.

I guess I should probably catch up on everything that's happened since our last post.

Well, the Peary crossed the equator on New Years Day, which I think is pretty cool. How many people can say they've done that?

The next big event for us was our arrival in Diego Garcia on January 3. For those of you that don't know, Diego is a small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia is one of the most difficult passport stamps to get. The island is a British territory, however it is mainly occupied by a U.S. Navy Support Facility. It turns out that Diego is a tropical island with crystal blue water and white sand beaches. The temperature that day was about 80 degrees and sunny, a stark contrast to the weather we will be seeing in the next few weeks.

  Before we could get off the ship and begin to explore the island, we first had to conduct some maintenance work on the main engine while it was not in use. This work consisted of replacing the fuel injectors on two cylinders and replacing the shock absorbers on five of the fuel pumps. Kate, Kyle and I only stayed for some of the work so that we could go explore the island in the daylight.

 

Well, exploring didn't take a whole lot of time. There is not a whole lot to do in Diego Garcia. After walking the beach, we went into town to check out the store. After about 20 minutes, we had completed our shopping and seen the rest of the town. We tried to find some kind of souvenir from Diego, just so we could bring something back with us. The only things we could find for sale that said Diego Garcia on them were a clock and a leather-bound notebook, so we didn't get any souvenirs.  We spent the rest of the evening with the ship's crew at the Seaman's Center. 

The next day, we were supposed to launch the ship's lifeboat. This is actually more exciting than it sounds, because the Peary is equipped with a free fall life boat, which essentially just drops off the back of the ship from 60 feet above the water. It would have been a pretty cool experience. But we had some issues with the rescue boat so they cancelled the launch. There is a chance that we will launch the boat at some point on our way back from Antarctica, so we will just have to wait and see.

Since Diego, we've had a fairly uneventful trip. We did encounter some rolling last week, but it wasn't too bad and neither Kate or I got seasick! We've filled our days with various repairs, maintenance, machine shop projects, and whatever other random tasks the engineering department can come up with. I have sort of become the IT person here on ship, called on several times to work on various computers around the ship. Kate even got to work on the crane one day!

Well, I think that about covers it for now. It sounds like we should be hitting some rough weather in the next day or so, so things could start to get a little interesting around here. I'll have to let you know how it goes in the next post!