October 9

Temp: 32 F

Weather: Cloudy, occasional snow, 20 knot winds

Last night nature  put on a spectacular show, about 60 miles offshore of the Village of Wainwright. A backdrop of stars were as clear and bright as I think I've ever seen them, while a dome of green and white waving aurora dangled from the sky. And there was one other light in the sky too. Another 20 miles offshore to the west we could see the sparkling light of Shell's drilling rig low on the horizon. Overnight we traveled out to the Chukchi Sea shelf break. The morning's first order of business was meeting a Coast Guard helicopter at 0900. It was not training this time-someone was evacuated from the ship. I don't know who it was or why they left, but the operation went smoothly.

Today we made it past 73 degrees latitude, about 140 miles northwest of Point Barrow. We left the continental shelf behind, traveling into waters over 2000 meters (1.25 miles) deep. After transiting for four days, this was our first destination. The Healy is currently our nation's only working polar icebreaker. Besides tasks like breaking ice for fuel delivery to Nome last year, one of the ship's main missions is to facilitate science. This cruise is focused on physical oceanography. There are 37 scientists on board. Two of us are seabird observers, and there are a couple journalists and others on miscellaneous detail, but everyone else is here to deploy moorings or run "CTD" scans, to learn about temperature, salinity, circulation patterns, underwater acoustics, and more.

Being this far from anywhere made me feel a bit uneasy. We kept searching for signs of life among the whitecaps, and after a while two female eiders flew past heading west. Their next stopover site may be Russia's Wrangel Island or the northern Chukotka Coast. While the oceanographers were busy searching for their acoustic mooring, there was something else I was looking for. Living far offshore where very few people ever go, the Ivory Gull is the pinnacle of high Arctic birding, and one of the top three sightings I'd hoped for on this trip (along with Short-tailed Albatross and polar bear). After a while, there came a white speck on the horizon. A speck that grew into a dot, which eventually grew into the shape of a gull, far off on the horizon. Reflecting bright white and flying bouyantly-more like a tern than a big heavy gull-Andy and I knew that it was an Ivory Gull. A couple of high-fives later, a pair of them were circling the ship, and most everyone on the bridge was interested in what all the excitement was about. All together Andy and I saw as many as eight Ivory Gulls, including one juvenile bird. Another good day at sea as we headed south into a sunset in the direction of Hanna Shoal.