![\"Jacob's](\"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/79\/2019\/06\/Jacobs_ladder_small-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Antarctic adventure has begun! Right after Christmas, I left my family home in Chicago and headed off to Punta Arenas. The next day, was a whirlwind of orientation meetings, trying on ECW gear (extreme cold weather clothing loaned to cruise participants by the US Antarctic Program), last-minute shopping, and moving onto the ship. After all our gear was stowed, I furiously worked to finish up some last minute tasks from back at WHOI. I wasn\u2019t sure how good our internet connectivity would be during transit, so I wanted to clear off my administrative responsibilities as much as possible. It was a pretty late night.<\/p>\n
Yesterday we left port and scooted around the coast of Chile. We organized our gear a bit more, and I spent some time reviewing my sampling plan. It\u2019s a little daunting to think about how I\u2019ll be able to get it all done, but it will be a lot of fun to try, and I\u2019m in really good company. I\u2019ve folded in with the \u201czooplankton group,\u201d run by Debbie Steinberg, who is also our Chief Scientist.<\/p>\n
Today we had more safety training, including practicing climbing up a Jacob\u2019s ladder in our steel-toed boot and a float coat (picture above). This practice is important because this is the type of ladder that is used to move from the ship to a small boat. After that I got to help string up a large plankton net, something I\u2019ve never done before. I was thinking that my Dad would have been proud because he\u2019s the one that taught me to tie a bowline in the first place. Today I also tried out the treadmill for the first time. It\u2019s not particularly rough right now, but the ship was rolling enough to make running interesting. I had to hold on with at least one hand and sometimes two.<\/p>\n
In a couple of days, we\u2019ll arrive at Palmer Station, and we\u2019ll be able to start sampling soon after that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Antarctic adventure has begun! Right after Christmas, I left my family home in Chicago and headed off to Punta Arenas. The next day, was a whirlwind of orientation meetings, trying on ECW gear (extreme cold weather clothing loaned to cruise participants by the US Antarctic Program), last-minute shopping, and moving onto the ship. After…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":85,"featured_media":773,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/85"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=772"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":900,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions\/900"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/site\/tarrantlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}