A little homesick today, I think. We’re back out in the southern ocean and there’s been a bit of a snowstorm today and all the familiar creaks and groans and noises of the ship rolling around are back again. The regular Saturday emergency muster on deck was cancelled, I guess because of the weather, and then someone took pity on all of us and cancelled the replacement muster in the mess room too, which meant I could go back to bed after breakfast, curl up under the doona with snow whizzing past the porthole horizontally, read for a while and then fall into a seasick-tablet-induced snooze (love those things). It was very cosy. But I think this is a tough part of the voyage in a way – most of the adventures are over and there’s still a long way to go before we get home.

For me it’s also time to call up my discipline and really do some solid work on the novel about Ingrid and her mates, as I plan to have the first draft done by the time we pull in to Hobart. I’ve made fairly good progress so far – at least in terms of quantity. I can’t make any judgment on the quality when I’m this close to it. But it always helps that writerly confidence to see pages of words, even if they’re terrible.

Cookie, the outgoing Davis Station leader, had a big pile of stuff waiting for me when I got to Davis about Caroline Mikkelsen’s landing place and someone has another theory that it hasn’t yet been found – he gave me papers with fascinating little scrawls on them and arrows and things like ‘the secret to finding the cairn is…’ What great material. I think today I’ll start working through it all, so you’ll hear more on that front soon.

In the meantime, all you blog readers, I’ve been pouring my heart out for four weeks now – and remembering that I can’t read the comments – I’d love a few emails from home to hear what people are up to, and I know there are some friends and families of other expeditioners who’ve been reading the blog – feel free to email me and introduce yourselves.

Off to lunch

Love Jesse xx