After some frustrating attempts to get tags out today, we managed to get a tag on a female seal at the end of the day. She was sleeping on an ice floe with three other seals. We now have deployed 6 tags on seals so far. Tomorrow we will try to find an area with ice that is easier to work in and or has more seals. The idea is to move down the Tickle Passage, between Adelaide Island and the Continent.

Dave Weimer took this photo of a crabeater seal in the water. Dave Weimer is one of the staff members at Palmer Station who joined us for this cruise.

The picture of pancake ice shows what we now have to deal with as it gets colder. When we first arrived, fresh ice was hard to find and now as the temperature drops we are seeing more new ice each day. While this is beautiful it also makes operating our small, inflatable Zodiac boat difficult. To get to the ice floe where the seals were today, we had to go through a large section of newly frozen sea ice that had a lot of large chunks of ice in it. It made for interesting small boat operations!!. As usual, the Raytheon crew and Captain Marty of our ship, the L.M. Gould, did an excellent job of using the mother ship to create a path into the ice and then getting the Zodiac up to the ice floe so that we could work with seals.