The Pleasure of Shift Work | East Antarctica

Tuesday, 23 January 2024
Day 62 of 110ish

I’m up, I promise. I’m not functioning well, but I’m vertical.

Back To Work

We’re back fishing.

As expected, this morning was a shock to the system.

Gentleman’s hours are over and I’m minus about 4 hours of sleep. I’m eager to get back into my old routine. I quite like my shift days. It works well to get a good workout which conveniently uses up the rest of my data with a yoga video and then a sauna later in the day, a cold shower and a good sleep. 

I’ve got to get over this hump though and shock my body back into my new schedule. It will take a couple days so luckily there are lots of leftovers to deal out to the guys for brekkie while I’m still the walking comatose. 

Research Fishing The Lonely East Antarctic

Now that we’ve arrived to East Antarctica, we are obliged to CCMLAR to set 15 research lines and tag 5 fish per ton caught. Once we have done this work, there are two ‘boxes’ we can fish in to start on the EA toothfish quota.

There is only one other boat allowed to fish for toothfish here. A French boat. He’s not here yet so we have the grounds to ourselves for a few precious days. 

Japanese and Whaling

The only other boats around are a couple Japanese whaling ‘research’ vessels. We have looked at their tracks on Marine Traffic and you can pick out where they’ve had a kill. It’s heartbreaking to me. Apparently they are targeting Minke, Sei, and Brydes whales.

Being a complete dork, I wanted to educate myself on what the Japanese whaling vessels are allowed to do and what research they are doing. I won’t go into depth here but it does look like the International Whaling Commission has greatly reduced the number of whales allowed to be taken from these waters in the last decade. In fact, it appears that the last five years there has been a hiatus.

But they are definitely here and sharing these whale rich waters with us.

I also learned that the Japanese have built a new ‘mother ship’ so they have no intention of ceasing whaling. And what I learned is that for every mother ship, there are probably two other boats that do the harpooning. Once they have some kills, the mother ship comes around and they transfer to kills to the mother ship for processing.

I invite you to see what the IWC has to say on the matter and educate yourself on what is happening. It was eye opening but also appears that it’s all on the up and up as far as the whaling commission is concerned. Though the higher latitude countries are still busy scheming ways to get their whales.

My Oh Minke

Tom saw a Minke. Lucky guy!

Tom generally has all the animal spotting luck.

I haven’t yet but we’ve both seen rafts of Adelie penguins torpedoing through the water which is fun! At first you think it’s fish because they look so small, but your brain won’t accept that. So you look closer. And lo and behold, it’s not fish at all. It’s a raft of penguins on a mission. Loves it!

Back To Business

Otherwise, it’s back to business as usual. 

Our research location has us in an area where there are few icebergs so I’m hoping our fishing grounds have us near the East Antarctic ice shelf. I’ve been promised we will see land and I’m really looking forward to that.