Immediately after shift change this morning, I went to my room to pack the rest of the stuff I needed to ship northwards (to Christchurch). The last day for packaged mail from McMurdo to head north was Jan 31st. Luckily, with the help of my good Kiwi friend, Shaz, I was able to take advantage of Scott Base's 16 Feb deadline to "Guard Mail" a couple boxes north. Now that
everything I needed shipped out of here has in fact been shipped, I can breath a lot easier.
After lunch, I decided to join a bunch of people from my shift on a walk out to
Hut Point to look for seals that have been seen playing in the area. While hanging out on the point it self, we realized that the annual ice had melted enough to the point where there was an actual "beach" making up a shoreline on the Ross Sea! We decided to walk down to the shore and wait for our flippered friend to show his face. Soon after we made it down to the shore, we completely forgot about the seal and just took in the scenery.
A lot of thoughts and feelings started going through my head while standing there on the shore. For one, a feeling of calmness flowed over me. I forgot about all of the trivial things in my life and at work and just stared at the mountains across the sea. Nothing that screamed "Raytheon" or "USAP", just nature at it's finest. After a little bit, it really soaked into me that I was in Antarctica and I was actually standing at the edge of the Ross Sea! Weird, I know, considering this is 4 months into my second season at McMurdo and something like this had to tell me I'm actually in Antarctica. Another thing that really made me smile was the salty smell of the sea once I got closer to the shore. For months, I've been devoid of smells outside when I'm trying to take in the environment. It was really refreshing to smell that smell as the wind blew it towards us. On top of all that, we did, in fact, get to see the one seal we kept coming to visit. I wish I had photos of him but I was with people who did. He would hang out by one of the ice drifts for a little bit then dive back under the water for 20 minutes or so and play. We also saw sea spiders, starfish, sea urchins, and small jelly-fish (keep in mind in near freezing water) all in the water and tidal pools by the shore. It's hard for me to explain unless you all were there next to me seeing and experiencing what I was at the time. Just simply
being there killed days if not weeks of stress out of my body. Today was probably one of my favorite days of the season, if not the year...
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