Our science contingent returned from their hike yesterday tired but elated to have counted the Chinstrap penguins in the vapour Coll colony. They counted in excess of 19,000 nesting pairs of penguins in a about six hours! Three times! They have to count each group of penguins until they have three counts and those counts have to be within 5% or each other. Lots of thumb action on the tally counters.

Whilst we were waiting in Fumarole Bay for the return of our clients I cooked the main part of dinner, a kind of Greek style lamb casserole where the lamb is marinated in yogurt, ginger and paprika for a few hours before cooking. I later served it with polenta - Its always good to try a new recipe when you know that the clients are going to be cold, tired and hungry!

We picked the guys up off the beach at about 7pm and headed back for our little cove in Stancombe Bay. We were headed directly into stiff breeze gusting around 30 knots and visibility was down to a couple of hundred metres. We motored into the outer pool of Stancombe and I held station whilst we launched the Zodiac and Magnus and Eric (the cameraman) sped off to check on conditions inside the cove. We decided, now that we have four good anchor points on shore there, that we wouldn't try to set our main anchor but to just to use the shore lines. Magnus and Eric set up one of the shore lines and waited with the end in the zodiac while I drove Pelagic in through the entrance and parked alongside them; we quickly grabbed the line that they had in the zodiac and made fast to the stern whilst they sped of to set another line from the bow. With both ends of the yacht secured we could attach the other two lines in a more leisurely manner.

Today evolved into a lay-day due to the late night last night and everybody wanting to rest their legs a bit. So lots of notes have been written up today, a couple went for a little hike and managed to find a fish on the top of a hill - a freshly dropped juvenile ice-fish presumably dropped by a tern.

We keep mentioning the shore lines so today I thought that I'd share a photo of our rope spools these occupy a large part of the deck just behind the mast. These are the ropes that we lead from the bow and stern of the yacht to whatever we can find on the shore; usually we put wire strops around large boulders and tie the ropes to those.

An early start is planned for tomorrow. If we can get out of Port Foster past the ice then we'll try to land at Baily Head otherwise it looks like a long hike to Macaroni point for the scientists.