Before receiving a proper auger, allowing us to make holes large enough to launch the CTD, we are looking for seal breathing holes. Preferably in the fractures, where the ice is thinner. Like the hunters, except that we expand the hole without waiting for the seal to come to breathe! The winch is then set up for a CTD cast. A few kilometres from the village, the depth exceeds 500 meters, impressive. Saturday, Jeffrey came back with four seals. While we brought back a few kilobytes.

A fox has eaten one of the cables of the IMB! I protected the other ones with a bit of diesel oil...

The electromagnetic inductive icemeter (EM31) is still giving me a hard time, but it should soon allow us to do long surveys of ice thickness in each of the major fjords around Grise Fiord.

The technique of sampling plankton, before sending images to the program Plankton of the World, is not yet fully developed. Net and screen are freezing too fast, and it is not easy to carry enough water to Vagabond to filter in the warm... All this quickly so that, if possible, the plankton is still alive under the microscope!

Thanks to our daily weather and ice growth data Humfrey Melling is giving us this graph that illustrates the specific character of South Cape Fiord, where Vagabond spent the winter of 2011-2012.