Elephant seals are AWESOME!

This entire post is basically going to involve pictures of elephant seals as I have no pearls of wisdom to share right now but a few pictures which capture the ridiculousness of these creatures.  The last couple of days have been spent opening up the BAS base at Signy for the summer.  This means we are now south of 60 degrees latitude which I believe means we are in proper Antarctic territory.  From my point of view, opening up a base means sorting through a lot of medical kit and restocking the base supplies while ensconced in a nice warm room (it's starting to feel a bit like groundhog day with regards to the sorting of medical kit).  For many others, however, it involved a lot of shoveling of snow, whacking of ice with a pick-axe and shifting of heavy boxes of food and other stuff through the snow.  One lucky person got to drive the skidoo.  That lucky person was not me.  I have therefore made a mental note that this is something I will have to learn to do at some point as I am fairly sure I would quite like it.  However, I'm certainly not complaining as I did get a trip ashore, and was thus able to witness the seals close hand (extremely close hand in fact as they really have no fear of humans).  It seems they just lie around all day in their own waste smelling and making various unpleasant noises from different orifices and then, when required to move so that supplies could be shifted up the jetty, they move with the level of grace you would expect from a several tonne creature who is probably about 75% fat.  Nice.  Admittedly they do have very cute faces and I have decided that I approve of these seals.  I have no doubt they will be extremely relieved to know this.

He was trying to look angry......fail.