At about 3:30 am this morning, it started raining. I mean REALLY raining. Not the Seattle-winter, consistently precipitating all day, kind of rain – more like monsoon-wind driven sideways, solid sheet of water, drench you to your skin in a millisecond through your 4 layers of clothes, the outside one being supposedly impermeable, kind of rain.
Luckily for Bre and for me – our tent, surprisingly, given that we could only pound our stakes halfway into the ground due to volcanic cinders, withstood the challenge and was still standing, though being whipped to and fro as it strained against its tethers at 7:30 we decided that we better get up. We got dressed and during a well-timed brief respite, quickly made our way down from the terrace to see if the cook/work tent and Jody’s tent were still on the beach. They were – lucky for us, for that is where we would spend most of the day.
We heated up some water for coffee, had some breakfast and everyone decided that it was a good morning for "a late start” in order to give the weather time to decide if it was going to settle in or move on.
By noon, the rain had let up some, but the wind was still blowing. Tanya and Katya decided to head out to work. But since Bre, Jody and I most wanted to head back to Ainu Bay and that was at least a 3-hour round trip, we decided that there wasn’t adequate time left in the day to re-measure Profile 2 and take samples in the 3-4 hours that would remain for working. Thus we continued doing "office work” in the tent.
We congratulated ourselves for our good decision when the rain and wind kicked up again about 30 minutes later
and Jody spent most of the day working on drawing up sections, plotting profiles and documenting samples. I worked on sorting and labeling pictures and getting caught up on my journals. Bre also finished writing a summary of their work from Dushnaya Bay, which will be posted here soon.
Toward the end of the day, Jody began preparations for Bre’s birthday, which was the next day, by making her World Famous Russian-Field Pancakes.
Jody Bourgeois cooks her “World Famous Russian-Field Pancakes” in the cook/work tent in the geology shore camp on Matua. The occasion is Bre MacInnes’ birthday, so two types of pancakes will be cooked – with and without chocolate chips.
*Jody Bourgeois cooks her "World Famous Russian-Field Pancakes” in the cook/work tent in the geology shore camp on Matua. The occasion is Bre MacInnes’ birthday, so two types of pancakes will be cooked – with and without chocolate chips. *
Before we crawled into our warm, dry sleeping bags that evening, Bre made a preemptive birthday wish that the weather would be sunny and clear so that we could hike to Ainu Bay and do Profile 2 the next day.
Da Svidanya!
Misty