Whales! and a dentist...and secretly boarding a russian vessel

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We've been heading out to hut point and ob hill to look out towards the open water for whales, and we've been quite lucky seeing them. This past week I've seen 6 minke whales! There have been some orcas around, but I haven't seen them yet. They're cool to watch swimming around, diving, and spouting out in the little "lakes" of meltwater that are still surrounded by ice.

I went in for my denstist cleaning the other day. There's only one dentist and no hygenists or assistants, so when you're getting your teeth cleaned, you get to play the role of assistant and hold the suction tool and the squirt gun, which makes the cleaning a lot more interesting.

We had a big storm yesterday that ended up pushing a lot of the ice out, so the open water lakes have grown quite a bit. The funny thing is that during the storm, the visibility got so low (you couldn't see from one flag to the next), that we almost had a 4 van pile-up. This is funny b/c it was about 2:30 am so the only vehicles on the road were our 4 vans and the road is 15 miles long, so the odds of all the vehicles being in the same place are pretty low. Apparently Mel (at slow speeds) narrowly missed running head on into shafer and then kat had to swerve out of the way of shafer too. And Matt came upon the group all trying to get around each other just a few minutes later.

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After work a group of us headed out on the ob hill loop to cape armitage to look for whales. It was amazing! It was warm and windless, and we just sat down and watched a group of 5 to 7 minke whales playing around out in the little area free of ice. It was also cool to see them spouting out in very tiny holes and cracks in the pack ice itself. The day was so calm that you could not only see the spouting, but hear it as well. B/c the weather was so amazing, Elisha and I decided to do a ski up to castle rock and then finish out on the castle rock loop. It was a bit sad, b/c we realized it was probably the last time we'd be doing the loop this year. But we had amazing weather, so we stayed up there for a long time enjoying the view.

After midrats lunch we had a night shift ping pong tournament which I somehow managed to win.

The russian icebreaker was docked at the ice pier last night. We're not supposed to go onto the ice pier or onto the ships b/c of insurance purposes or something, but one of the nice things about night shift is there is no one around. Jean, who loves boats, wanted to board, so she convinced Elisha and I to go. When we got there, no one was around, so I was thinking we'd just turn around, but Jean went ahead and just boarded the ship. Then a russian guy came out, and since Elisha speaks Russian, she just started talking with him. We got invited on board and got to hang out a bit with the Russians, with Elisha serving as translator. We also got a cool tour of the whole ship including the smoke filled crew area, the engine room, and the control center in the bridge. Of course, when we were getting ready to leave, Elisha got asked to "be a guest in one of their beds", which she of course answered neyt spaceba (no thanks). The perfect way to cap off what was definitely a real russian experience.

We spent the rest of the evening practicing with our band (Aunt Shafer and the ice children featuring the manager Shafer, Elisha on guitar and vocals, Jerod on bass and vocals, margo on bass, jean on drums, and me on keyboard)