Changes in Latitudes

Tonight Pancho and I are flying to Oslo. Pancho will stay with Rigmor while I work in Tromsø tagging herring. Fingers crossed that he is ok this time around on the plane! I have been in touch with my colleagues a bit about this "tokt" because I have never tagged fish before, and I have been told that it is very different working conditions from a normal survey ("tokt"). We are sleeping on a 50 ft. sailboat that is attached to a floating platform where we will work from. Out in the elements! It is around freezing temperatures with a little wind, rain and snow; so, I've been well informed to bring lots of wool. Four of my colleagues have been up there since November 21st, and as of a couple of days ago they just had their first shower. One of them said that it is pretty cool the first night, but from day to onward it is pretty tight in the boat and comparable to camping. It isn't possible to wash clothes, but at the same time I was told not to bring too...

I will be heading back out on survey ("tokt") on December 1st working from a floating dock near Tromsø to mark herring. But since my last excursion I've been at the office learning how to age fish using otoliths or scales. Right now I'm being taught about Norwegian Spring Spawning herring (the most economically valuable fish that we study). Thought I'd share some pictures. [A few scales from a particular area on the fish are removed when we do the normal sampling, and are cleaned before they are placed on the slides] [Cleaned scales going on the microscope slide] [How the scales look under the microscope. This fish is 12 year old] [7 year old fish]

I have made friends from all over the world, and their voices on facebook were that of fear, despair and shock. I thought I'd share here what they all said this morning when we woke up to the disturbing news. ..Norwegians are just telling me to look forward to Christmas and just stay in Norway a little longer haha! New Zealand Disappointed and gutted.... feel like getting into a huddle, In need a pep talk 2016 -The year where people made decisions and woke up to regret them the next day. Oh shit America... I can't sit by silently. I'm devastated, like so many of my colleagues. That in this day and age: lying, corruption, sexism, racism and so many other things can be seen as okay. Its 2016 for heavens sake! This election thing is getting scary very quickly. It's times like these, we can truely appreciate living in little New Zealand. The nightmare is becoming reality...... Well when he ignores Climate Change Florida will be first to go. Am thinking t...

At the end of August, we bid on a house and "won" it after only being inside for all of 5 minutes. In reality, we probably paid mainly for the location, but we truly have the best spot in Bergen (in our opinion). The house was built in 1923 and needs a bit of love, but we have decided to take on little-by-little. While Marius was preparing the apartment for sale, I took on the first project myself. Our foyer was a nice shade of yellow, but I painted it white. I finally figured out why Scandinavians paint their interiors white.. With so little daylight in the winters, it is necessary to have the indoors be as bright as possible to combat the long dark days from November to March. [The previous yellow color of the foyer around the light switches, and the new white color] We've also started freshening up the living room. Before it was a shade of beige, and now it will be...white. I touched up the kitchen by getting rid of the flower wallpaper and painting it white...

This past weekend we revisited Iceland three years after my first visit. This time the reason was to visit Katrine who has been studying there this month. I really enjoy the relaxed vibe of Reykjavik. No one is in a hurry, and it's very quiet considering it is the largest city in Iceland. We got in very late on Friday night - rented a car and drove it to our AirBnB. We finally got to bed at 2:30AM local time (4:30AM Norwegian time), and had 6 hours to sleep before we were expected to be at Katrine's place for breakfast. When our alarms went off we threw on our hiking clothes and packed our bags for our daytrip. We were greeted with a great breakfast (including Skyr!! - Icelandic style yoghurt - my favorite). [Natural skyr with warmed up (frozen) berries] [I love breakfast] Saturday's itinerary was the Golden Circle. Without stopping it takes a little over three hours to drive the route. We started around 10 and got back by 6-ish. The highlights of the driv...

A last minute decision to run the Bergen famous Stoltzekleiven Opp... An email was sent around to the Institute asking if anyone else wanted to join Team Fisken ("the Fish") and run the Stoltzen Opp since they had some left over spaces available. I decided 'why not', and went for it.  I did not properly prepare for the race, in my opinion. After a busy summer I crammed in training for the Fjord Viking and then was sent on a survey for two weeks in the Barents Sea. The best way I could think of training up for Stoltzen was doing some hard spinning for half an hour. I ended up doing three 10-minute intervals at least every other day. I hopped on the bus Friday morning 50 minutes before race start not knowing who the guy I was supposed to get my bib from. I got off the bus and had to book it uphill to Fjellveien and then run to the start - I figured it was a nice 20 minute warm up. I was taking this race waaaayy too lightly since I had very low expectations of...

With the 6-on-6-off shifts, it's hard to remember how many days have passed and which day of the week it is, but I think it was the day before yesterday when I finally got some sunshine and saw some whales and dolphins! We have had cloudy skies the whole survey period except for this one day. Meanwhile, in Bergen, record high temperatures have been set all week as one last week of summer visited the city that also set records in July for the rainiest July on record. This particular day we finally had some bits of sun. Mostly cloudy, however, I saw a chance to put on my winter coveralls and sit outside for a few minutes. I saw a few fin whales in the distance, likely feasting on krill. I only saw the plume of mist when they surfaced. On the opposite end of the boat a small pod of dolphins was getting closer. One got close enough that I thought the picture would turn out way better than it did. Still need to share. It was the best day at sea! We only have five more sampli...