Weather

• Visibility: 15 miles
• Wind: 15 knots West most of the day, 30-40 in the evening.
• Sky: clear
• Water: 2′ chop

Ecological

• This morning there was a new large male elephant seal on Great Race.
• He is far larger than any of the other ones here.
• Then in the evening Chunk arrived on the Western part of the island, equalling the new male in size.
• Chunk was last reported as being on Great Race on March 4th of this year.
• Chuckles was last sighted on Great Race on February 29th of this year.
• I don’t think the other one is Chuckles, as I remember Chuckles being smaller.
• 15 in total on Great Race.
• Lots of entertaining e-seal sparring and interactions, much to the delight of the students.

Maintenance

• In the morning, the 4 of us finished uncovering the brick feature under the flywheel.
• We also cleaned the algae off of the flywheel and cleaned the solar panels.
• In the afternoon we scraped paint chips off the white railings near the derrick.
• Did the old water sampling method, as the YSI wasn’t turning on.

Boats

• Lots of eco-tours today.
• Most of them appeared to go too close to the sea lions.
• Several sailboats out on the water; beautiful!

Other

• Approximately 10 DND blasts today at the more easterly detonation station on Bentinck.
• This included blasts at 9:30, 9:40, 10:00, 12:48, 12:49, & 12:51.
• The initial blast scared several sea lions into the water.
• By my personalized scale, the first five were medium blasts, the final five were huge.
• For those of you wondering, my scale goes something like this: small, medium, big, huge, massive.