Shirley Island, being an island, requires a little bit of walking over sea-ice. The ‘bridge’ between the island and the main land is only about 100 metres long (but probably 1km wide), and the first time I crossed it I couldn’t even really tell where the ice was meant to start. This time I could though, it wasn’t like looking down into the water through the ice or anything (the ground just looked like you were walking on solid rock covered by snow) but you knew that there was water about 1.5m below the surface. Since things have been warming up a little lately there has been a bit of melting, and as it melts, the snow on the surrounding hills (which has compacted into a mini glacier over winter) slides down towards the water like a slow avalanche, causing the sea-ice to warp and stress a little. This is actually visible in places where ridges in the ice are starting to form, and if youre quiet you can hear it moving and cracking in places.
It was on the thin ‘bridge’ of ice that we started seeing little groups of penguins, and this super fat/super lazy Weddell seal, or was it a leech on Steggles growth hormone…?
This photo was taken from the island, looking back across edge of the sea-ice to the shore of the mainland (background). Aside from being extremely fast swimmers, penguins are also not to bad at jumping. They propel themselves out of the water fast enough to jump up onto the shelf, just prior to a spectacular belly-flop on the ice. 
The penguins seem to like hanging around in little groups of somewhere between 3 and 15 when they aren’t with the rest of the colony. Watch them for long enough and you also soon realise that there are definite personality differences between individuals. Some are very inquisitive, while some are extremely shy; some are leaders, and some are followers. But there is one thing they all have in common, they are all hilarious! While watching the penguins I had an idea for solving the world’s problems, heres my idea: I think if we just abolished knees from the human race, people would be too busy laughing at other people trying to perform every day tasks (such as climbing a staircase) that nobody would be thinking of war or dropping bombs on people. Actually, I might start a political party and push for the abolition of knees… im told all I need to do is spend $30 million of tax-payer’s money on advertising and I might have a chance of winning an election.
Anyway, sinicism aside, after watching a few small parties for some time, and getting some close-ups of the more inquisitive ones, we marched on to the colony. The numbers have grown significantly since my first visit and there are now several thousand penguins in the colony, I estimate. 
One thing they don’t tell you in training is that you must always try to approach a colony from an upwind direction… there isn’t really any top-soil in Antarctica to speak of… but the penguins do a pretty job of making their own, and once you get a good whiff of it… lets just say its not exactly the pristine Antarctic air that you might expect to be breathing in here.
The photo below shows a skewer trying to steal some eggs. They circle about 10 metres above the colony... definitely no ambiguity to their intentions. 
Well, another trip to Shirley Island, and a good time was had by all.
On Saturdays we have a Station Duties afternoon, where everyone is allocated a job such as taking rubbish to the burners, cleaning certain communal living areas, tending to the hydroponics, or… if you didn’t guess… fire training (it’s an important side of Antarctic life as you may have gathered). This and being slushy is a good way to have everyone contribute, and also keeps people domestic in a way. The thing is that down here you don’t have to call a plumber and get them to fix your toilet, chances are they’ll already know because you’re evidently using theirs. Or if you need an electrician to change a recently blown capacitor for a power supply, or light bulb, they’re here (I haven’t gone through the specifics, but im pretty sure standing on a chair to change a bulb would require a ‘working-at-heights’ certificate, and im not qualified for that…) We’ve also got mechanics, chefs, communications operators (a polite way of saying nerds), and chippies here, so there isn’t a lot we CAN do!
This is just our Meteorology (met) area, but you can see the exposed rock that Is starting to appear. 
This was only a 45knot wind or so, but still a blizzard, and still quite strong.
Well, its Wednesday evening and we’ve been here for more or less a week. Its been pretty eventful!
As far as work goes I don’t have much to say except that its good to finally do something, as opposed to training and being inducted constantly for the past 3 months! We have worked out a roster which means long days on days of work, but more days off for field trips and excursions into the big white. While I basically knew how to do my job before arriving, there were also a lot of things specific to Antarctica which has been hard to take in. time zones for example: for different reasons I am working on Casey time (meals, sleep, aviation reports etc), Mawson time (aka Casey Bastard time, for 3 hourly synoptic reports), GMT/UTC (for balloon launches), and ACT/NSW/TAS time (for Eb and family and Hobart head office). I’ll get there I guess. 
Anyway, Once we put the high seas behind us it was smooth sailing for another 2 or 3 days before we got into the ice. Im not sure what I was expecting in terms of the first ice sightings, maybe a titanic sized berg floating by, accompanied by seals, penguins, albatross' and a killer whale or two...? Or a sheer wall of sea-ice confronting us like the front line of an army, which we had to ram, then ram again and again...? 
In any case, it started much less dramatically... a patch of pancake ice (pieces around 1-2m in diameter) floating past my bedroom window as I woke up, then practically nothing till lunch time. By mid-afternoon though we were steaming through thick pancake ice, which was increasing hourly into small floes.
The next morning it was basically 0.5 to a metre thick (or even more... its hard to tell sometimes), which is thick enough to drive a truck over. On the third day of our 'ice-land-ik' traverse we were starting to have trouble. The ship sometimes had to have 2 or 3 goes at ramming a particularly stubborn section of ice and we had to really start picking our path to Casey. In the end we stopped a little less than 80 nautical miles from Casey, and commenced "flyoff" operations on the 30th of October.
Before this though, as we started entering the sea-ice, we were put through a certain "ceremony" of induction... Our 'crossing-the-line' (60 degrees south) ceremony was far from Golding-esk, but fairly stupid never-the-less. The worst thing is that I was later told that the certificate they gave me (picture on the right) is useless if I want to cross the equator by sea. In that case I would be put through a similar ritual. Oh well, at least some people liked it.
