Adventures to Penguinland and beyond ...: And so it begins again ...

Winter 2014 - By Mairi Fenton

And so winter starts again. I have been looking forward to this even more than last year. It was a very weird moment seeing the Shack leave with many people from last winter but staying behind myself.
Now we are having the base to just 19 of us again (18 last year). The ship sailed off early in the morning after a lot of us spent most of the evening before in the bar on the Shack to see some different faces and a different location for the last time. We waved the ship off with flares as it is tradition. The first day of having the base to ourselves we celebrated with sampling! It was a beautiful day for a CTD.

The next day we had to catch up on some diving work. On the dive I notice red colour coming out of my dive buddies glove and got worried that she had cut herself. She assured me that it was bovrel (it is tradition for the old team to play tricks on the new team - bovrel seems to be a favourite). When we got back to the dive store and Gail took her dive gloves off we were in for a surprise: instead of bovrel, the gloves had been filled with food colouring and she was left with a blue and a red hand. Laughing very hard, I thought I was safe as I didn't have any colouring coming out of my gloves. Turns out my hands resembled those of Shreck. Besides swapping phones, changing auto-correct options in word and turning screens around, this was certainly my most favourite prank.