The Mother Ship Has Arrived!!!

And yes I said Ship because I have been told that if it is 0-50 feet in length it is a boat, and if it is from 50-75 feet it is a yatch, and if it is over 75 feet than it is a ship. Don't screw this up when you are around Coast Guard people. You are likely to get your head bitten off.

The ship is the Sweedish Ice Breaker Oden. http://www.polartrec.com/odenexpedition/overview And they are currently cutting a shipping channel into McMurdo through the sea ice. They arrived at the ice edge on Christmas Day and they have been working all week. We can see them very easily from Hut Point which is the point just off of town about a 1/2 mile walk from our room.

This is the updated location of the ship. If you look at the two black dots on the right side of the Oden's path, those are Tent Island and Inaccessable Island, which we drove past a month ago on our Delta trips to Cape Evans. Also, around Tent Island (the dot closer to McMurdo) is where I did my Sea Ice School back in October and at that time the ice thickness was over 4 meters thick! However you can see from the map that the shipping channel is the same for this year as it was for last year. That way they don't have to break through the thicker, stronger multi year ice. Also, one other interesting note. They will be cutting right along where the Ice Runway was a few weeks ago. The Ice Runway was built on the new ice from last years shipping channel.

These are some shots of the Oden a few days ago when a group from McMurdo went out to the ship by helocopter. I have no idea why they went, I just know that they took photos, and that is all I really need.

Here is a tour of the control room. If you look at the screen to the left, this is the navigational proximity vector target tragector thingy. Ok, I am a light vehicle mechanic, this doesn't qualify as a light vehicle in any sense of the word. So lay off me if I don't know anything about how they drive the ship! At least I know it is a SHIP!

And this is the finished product. Well not the finished product, but the finished product for right now. They will make several passes to widen the channel and open up the harbor here in McMurdo I am told. Also they will continue to pass through the channel during ship offload to keep the channel from freezing up again.

These are some natural ice crack near the ice edge. These cracks combined with some good winds from the south will open up McMurdo Sound for us this year hopefully.

We are having a very windy day today and we are expecting wind and snow for New Years Day here, so hopefully that will help push out some of the sea ice. Well it is about 4 hours until New Year here, so I hope you all have a very good New Years and we will be spending our New Years Day sitting around out of the wind watching NFL football.

Enjoy.

R.J.