On Wednesday I was on cleaning duty in the common area, which involves serving the meals and  cleaning the dishes. There are no personnel here to do so, so everyday a team of three people complete these duties. It's like living in a big community, which is great because people are very friendly. It was a good day to be on duty because the weather was very poor. We are not lucky this year with the weather.  It's quite unusual to have such a long period of windy and stormy days.  Although the weather had not improved, on Thursday we started counting the
breeding pairs of Adelie penguins on the Island of Petrel, where the base is located. There are many colonies all around the base. The total number fluctuates around 11000 breeding pairs, so it's take a long time to monitor all the colonies. We continued Saturday and Sunday, and the weather was still not cooperative. It was not easy to stand with wind speeds around 130km/hr! But we did it! Now we have complete counts on the island nearby.

On Thursday night I gave a public lecture. Most of the people here are not scientists and are doing technical work to maintain the base. They were very interested and we stayed talking until very late about climate change and
their impacts. It was great!

Friday the weather was more clement and we went to Florence to put the last satellite device on a Wedell Seal. The fieldwork on Wedell Seals is now finished and was successful so Jean Benoit offered champagne to everybody and we had a great dinner.

Saturday morning we had awesome chocolate croissants and this week we were lucky and had wonderful birthday cake twice! I will take pictures next time of the cake as there are more birthdays coming.

The snow petrels finally arrived few days ago. I enjoy them a lot. They are so beautiful, flying across the blue sky and making strong, almost musical noise, to attract a mate.

Finally, we are still waiting on the boat to unload the food, materials and the last eight persons of the first rotation. One helicopter has not worked for one week and an aircraft is supposed to drop the missing piece. However, the weather is so bad that there has not been a flight yet. The boat is deriving further from the base and they have to restrict the fuel to be able to come back. It has already been one month since we left, and I really commend the people waiting to be debarked. I'm glad I made it to the base on the tiny window of time we had! Unfortunately, this will also delay all the next rotation, and I probably won't be back for Christmas. It's a reminder to us that we are in Antarctica, and we do not control the harsh conditions!