A French research vessel is breaking the ice in Dunedin.
Antarctic icebreaker L'Astrolabe will spent the next month at the Birch St wharf undergoing maintenance, repairs and resupplying.
"We're getting ready for our season," Captain Stan Zamora said this week.
"We haven't been to Dunedin before. We usually go to Hobart, so it's a nice change for us to be here. We hope to have a look around Dunedin while we're here."
The ship is used for oceanographic research and to transport scientists, passengers and cargo to the Institut Polaire Francais Dumont d'Urville research station in the Antarctic.
"The trip is not very nice and the ship is rolling a lot," chief mate William Roche said.
"About 90% of the scientists get seasick. On one trip, the ship was rolling 40 degrees from side to side so hard, I couldn't change my clothes for three days.
"We can have 10m waves and the bridge is only 8m. It is fantastic down there, though, and the scientific experiments are very interesting. I decided to do one trip and have been here for five years now."
L'Astrolabe usually does five trips from Hobart to the Antarctic between October and March.
The 12 crew members have two months on and two months off.
"We work and live very closely together, which can be hard sometimes," Mr Roche said.
"But we all get on well. It is a good life."
The 66m L'Astrolabe is one of the smallest research vessels working in Antarctic waters. It was built in 1986 in Scotland as a supply platform for oil rigs amd was previously named Fort Resolution and Austral Fish.
It has a top speed of 12 knots and a range of 19,200km. Its twin 2300kW Mirrlees diesel engines are capable of driving the ship through 1m pack ice at 3 knots.
The ship has also had its share of drama. In 2005, a crew member fell overboard and drowned, and a helicopter ferrying passengers between the ship and Dumont d'Urville station crashed in bad weather in 2010, killing all four people on board.
