Having enjoyed my last summer in France until 2023, I am ready to start the training.

I will start in Brest, where I will meet the other computer science guys who will go to the other districts, namely Crozet, Amsterdam and Dumon D’Urville.

Together we will have a bit more of a month of training in order to get us ready to handle our different missions… I say different as on top of our primary job we will also be responsible for several scientific roles.

During this first week we will be presented the network and system architecture of our stations, and some of the unusual intervention such as the passage of sea elephants through our cable-trays or rats having a bite at our optical fibers… During our stay there we will be housed in the Conquet where we will try (a few times) the Brittany crepes and swim in the refreshing water of the ocean.

We will continue with two weeks in Strasbourg where we will join the electronician of our districts with whom we will work in pair on the different scientific programs. My partner Arthur happens to also be knowledgeable in computer science and interested to bring his radioamateur equipment to Kerguelen, this is going to be fun!

Together we will share our first week with the penguins guys who will train us for our job regarding penguins tracking. They will also share with us the studies they made and are currently doing, all more interesting than the other. Living right on top of the “beer academy” pub, we will quickly socialize together around some beer and flammkuchen, dish that we will eat in quantity during our stay.

During the second week we will be taught earth magnetism and seismology. And while seismology will bring back high school memories, measuring the magnetic field will take us a few days to get around it.

Back to Brest for another round a training regarding another few scientific programs and get an electrical training certification. I have now the right to do a few interesting electrical task, but also to arm the circuit breaker and replace a light bulb 😄

We will also manage to get our hands on a surf board (but no wetsuit) to ride the Brittany waves.

The second week will be about yet another role that we will have, namely assisting the “gener”, the person responsible for all the logistic regarding freight from and to Kerguelen but also planning all the trips outside of the station and keeping inventories in the cabins around the islands. We will finish the week with general presentations for all the French Polar Institute personnel going to the sub-antarctica¹, the occasion to finally meet a lot of the people I will be going with!

I intentionally did not go into the detail of all the projects I will be working on, I will explain them in detail during the year !

Next post will be about the 2 weeks quarantine at la Réunion, or how to occupy oneself at the hotel.