Travels of a Fish Nut

We have had a good couple of weeks and have filled the freezers which means we’ve had to come to land to unload. We’re off again later today (Wednesday) and I’m really looking forward to going out again. It feels very strange to be on land, stable, unmoving, land. Coming in to land was really fun. When we left FIPASS (Falkland Islands Port and Storage Services) initially it was the early hours of the morning and I was asleep. We came in early yesterday morning and came in sight of land just after dawn. The weather was gorgeous although it was very cold. It was very nice to see Stanley, and coming in through The Narrows to see the town appear was really cool. Another ship was unloading so we had to wait in Stanley harbour for a few hours. It was quite annoying being so near to land and yet so far. Even if I had the strength to swim to shore I would’nt have tried it as the water was under 4 degrees C! Luckily I was offered the opportunity to come to shore by launch so I got picked up an...

The boat has its clock set one hour ahead of Falklands time, for reasons that elude me. Apparently it’s so that there’s more daylight when people are working, but seeing as they work when there’s work regardless of the hour and most of the work is done in a windowless factory, I can’t see the point other than to cause confusion for me when arranging to talk to people on the radio! However, it does have some benefits. Namely, I get to see the sunrise as well as the sunset, which is quite unusual for me! Sunrise and sunset, dusk and dawn are - there’s no other word for it - magical. There are birds flying around, silhouettes in the pale light, and the sea and sky seem to go on for ever. Here are a few of my favourite photos I thought I’d share with you.

As I’m sure you can imagine, I get to see quite a few seabirds out here in the South Atlantic. I just wasn’t prepared for how many I’d see. There are THOUSANDS. We’re in the Loligo fishing grounds at the moment and it’s pretty much the height of the season so there are quite a few trawlers around, each with their own contingent of seabirds. That makes for a lot of birds. Now, when I say seabirds I don’t mean scrawny seagulls like you get in Weston! Admittedly, there are a few seagulls, but they are vastly outnumbered by the albatrosses. The majority are black-browed albatrosses ( Diomedea melanophris ): but there also northern and southern giant petrels ( Macronctes halli and M. giganteus ) (I can’t tell the difference yet) and cape petrels ( Daption capense ) in abundance. There are also quite a few royal albatrosses ( Diomedea epomophora ) around which amazing and have, according to my bird book, a larger wingspan than wondering albatrosses. Royal albatrosses are huge birds which...

I should start by saying that there is very little bycatch in the Loligo fishery (which is actually a type of squid in case I haven’t mentioned that already) and most of it is rockcod (Patogonotothen spp.). Due to the fact that I see them all the time, I keep forgetting to take photos of Loligo and rockcod to show you, but I will try and rectify that soon. In the mean time, here are some photos of some of the things that have been caught so far: This is probably the coolest bycatch we’ve had. It’s Moroteuthis ingens , or the greater hooked squid. This one has about a 40 cm long mantle. I didn’t measure the longest tentacles because my 1m long ruler wasn’t long enough! These are the internal organs of the male (first photo) and female (second photo). One of my main jobs is to sex and age squid, though Loligo are much smaller. You should be able to see the difference! This is probably the bycatch I feel sorriest for. It’s an octopus, and I think the species is Benthoctopus eureka . It...

Well, I’ve been on board for almost two weeks, and I’m loving it. The people are really friendly, the food is fantastic and the work is really interesting (most of the time!). Every day is a different, even though the work is always basically the same. There are generally four trawls a day unless there’s a problem but the precise time of hauling varies. This means that that when I work depends on when we haul. I try and work the middle two hauls of the day which generally come in around 11am and 4pm, but sometimes I’m feeling energetic and will work the 6am haul, or work late and do the 10pm haul. The hours I work vary depending on circumstances such as the time they take to process the catch which depends on its size and the amount of bycatch. I’ll talk more about that in the next post. The first couple of days I was sea sick, unable to keep anything down. The sea was rough which didn’t help (Beaufort 8 for a while). But eventually I got better and now it doesn’t bother me at all. One...

I am hopefully going to sea this evening for about 3 weeks or so. I don't know when I'll next be able to post, so assume no news is good news and I'll write when I get back!

I thought I’d try and explain a bit about Stanley and the Falklands. The town is on the side of a hill and the centre is fairly grid-like in arrangement, though in the eastern and western fringes it gets a bit more haphazard as the bay curves. The houses are mostly detached houses or bungalows, and a variety of building materials are used but the most common is wood. The gardens are mostly just plots of land with few flowerbeds and only very hardy trees and bushes. A few have vegetable patches growing cabbages, etc, but again, these are few and are between. The grass is not lawn grass and the gardens are often lumpy as the land is quite boggy. Stanley is bigger than I was expecting but this is due to a building boom in the last decade or so. There are grocery shops located throughout the town, called Kelper Stores and are numbered 1 to 4. The main store is the West Store which is found on the main road, Ross Road, in Stanley. It is the biggest store but that does not mean that if the W...

It’s hard to believe I’ve only been here a week. I feel like I’ve been here forever, though luckily everything is still new and interesting. Work has been interesting – I’ve been learning how to sex and age squid, how to use the database, and how to cut otoliths. I feel about as ready as I’ll ever be to go on board and start observing. There’s not much interesting to tell. I’m at work from 8am to 4.30pm and it’s pretty dark by the time I get home. The short days are making me more tired than I feel I should be, as are the early mornings (I’m not used to them!). Luckily, work hasn’t been too arduous yet and by the time I have things to do I should be more used to the early starts! And when you get presented with sunrises like this it isn’t too hard to get motivated! On Sunday I went to Fitzroy and saw some of the war memorials. There was one to the Welsh Guardsmen who died and another to those on the Sir Galahad. The memorials seemed so small against the landscape. Both memorials had at...

The past couple of days have been absolutely fantastic. On Friday night Pablo, the observer I'm sharing the house with at the moment, showed me the local pubs. The pubs are more English than English pubs, with union jack flags all over the place. The smoking ban has not been put in place here so they are very smoky but the drink is cheap so I don’t mind that much! Early in the morning it rained which melted most of the snow. I had a walk around town and saw the mizzenmast from the SS Great Britain! I also saw some very large seabirds which I later identified as southern giant petrels. Apparently they like congregating around the sewage outlets in the harbour! They are huge, grey birds with a wingspan of a couple of metres, according to my bird book. In the afternoon I went for a walk along the Stanley Bypass, the road behind/above Stanley. There are lots of upland geese around, as well as a species of vulture which is black with a red head. I also these birds. I don’t know what the...

I’m here! It’s been snowing and there’s snow flurries every now and then. The sun set well before 5pm and it’s probably only about 0 degrees C. It’s fantastic! The landscape is stark and completely stunning. It’s very flat with jagged rock outcroppings. There are no trees or even bushes that I could see, only grass. Getting here was pretty uneventful. We started taxiing at midnight, only one minute late, and took off just after ten past. We landed in Ascension around 7 am local time (Ascension is an hour behind the UK at the moment), and were there for about an hour and a half. Coming in to land is most disconcerting as there are no signs of life at all. No boats, no islands, nothing. I could easily imagine that we had run out of fuel looking for this dot in the Atlantic and rather than scare us by telling us he was ditching the plane, the pilot decided to lie that we were landing on dry land. Luckily, this wasn’t the case and land did appear, seconds before we touched down! Ascension ...