Today was a little more calm than yesterday, but it wasn't entirely without incident! Walked in to breakfast this morning to find that the cargo ship had nudged (slight understatement) the ice pier a little bit - moved the entire thing (that's a BIG chunk of ice) about 10 feet and broke the bridge to it in the process. As you might guess, cargo vessel offload took a while to get started while they got the bridge repaired.

Fortunately, I was mostly isolated from all the chaos around town while working the pits out at Willy with Matt again. We ended up fueling 8 planes; 4 LC130s and 4 Twin Otters. Two of the Otters were leaving for the season, which means an 8(?) leg trip for them from McMurdo to South Pole to Rothera to Chile, then bouncing through a few places I can't remember to get to Houston (or was it Austin...) then home base in Calgary. Sounds like an interesting, although long, trip to me! It finally sunk in today that the season is drawing to a close and I'll likely never see a lot of my friends from here again when the two Otters left. Wally and Brian, the crew of one of the planes, walked across the pits (I was taking care of an LC130 at the time) to shake hands and say their goodbyes before they took off. It's a bittersweet feeling, but I'm ready to go and get on with whatever will come next.

A tilted picture of an LC-130 landing in front of Black Island with a garden variety Fata Morgana on the horizon.	Matt fueling the same LC-130 a few minutes later. At the same time, cargo is loading it with a pallet train (several pallets stuck together to hold big items.)
The American Tern getting started with offload