Taken from the wheelhouse of a 45' ice-reinforced trawler, this photo a sunset about 10 years ago in the North Atlantic off the coast of Cape Breton. The ice you see is called slog ice, or pancake ice. It's semi-hard slushy/mushy ice in 10-20' diameters. Since you sleep in the V berth of these boats, it an interesting noise as it slams up against the hull a couple of inches from your head. You're always wondering which one is going to be the one to open up a hole into your bunk. An interesting side note here is between the 4-5 day trips I stayed at a hotel, where reading the paper one morning I just happened upon the obit of a friend I had gone to high school with, along with being in the same basic training class for the navy a 7 years earlier. He had joined the regular navy as a diver, and while conducting hull searches in a foriegn port, he was sucked into a cooling intake of an American ship. Cause of death? Ineptitude, possibly drug use.....who knows on US ships. They aren't a well motivated military.....just blindly loyal.
This is another photo of me taken about 10 yrs or more ago, while I was an International Fisheries Observer. Next to me is who I think is the 2nd refrigeration engineer. Heck, he might have been the 1st. Never really could figure much who was who....but never saw him do much so he must have been an engineer. This is about 3 weeks out to sea....no sight of land. I can tell because I usually only shaved once a month at sea. Can't remember the ship's name...might have been Luga again. Looking down over the rail to my left shoulder would be the trawl deck where they hauled back the fish. Silver hake is what they were fishing for....it's an oily fish, sometimes known as white fish. 
