Claires cakes for the field parties

After waking up at 8am to see if I might be able to take some scientists out to the islands I retreated back to bed as it was my day off and it was blowing horizontal snow. I rowed 10km on the rowing machine in the gym and then after a leisurely brunch headed out for some ice climbing with a group. After ice climbing in shitty conditions – gusting 40 knots we wondered back to the bar and decorated it for christmas.

So it seems like everyone who has spent time down here is a scrooge and isn’t into christmas at all which kind of sucks. Us newbies have our advent calenders and Claire spent an afternoon making christmas cake last week.

However, I still haven’t got the christmas spirit going especially as we will be working on the actual day! But I might be lucky as I might be sent out to the field for a week over christmas in which case I will be in a little hut 200 miles from here on the actual day with the parcel my mother sent down.

The Dash 7 in the hanger

Outside of the hut at Lagoon

Inside of Lagoon Hut

Another picture of inside of Lagoon Hut showing the reflex stove.

Inside Anchorage hut – needs some girls to come and sort it out!

Outside of hut at anchorage

One of the small uncomfortable looking bunks in Anchorage hut

There are up to 105 people on base at its height this season and so there is a need for a system of keeping tabs on where everyone is. The support staff are pretty constant however, people are coming and going into the field everyday and also visiting scientists are in an out of base for sometimes only a few days.

The picture above is of the tagging out board. The station is divided into zones and then there is local travel, boating, islands, field, flying etc. When you are moving from one zone to another you have to move your name tag to the correct zone. If you are going off station you have to write in a book your name and where you are going. All the support staff carry a VHF radio 24 hours a day as well and we have a repeater on reptile ridge which give channel 18 a much broader effective area. My radio is on at night as well as Claire’s my roommate as I am on SAR duty most of the time and Claire is the Dr.

Who ever is on gash is in charge of checking every half hour the book and sometimes a call will go out on VHF looking for someone who is over due or forgot to tag themselves back into the station. So a very effective way of keeping people safe.

So living down here is pretty crazy in the amount of time you change clothing each day. In one day I am regularly in 7 different outfits.

I start my day at 6:45am in my gym clothing and go and row 5km on the rowing machine. Back by 7:30am in my room and change into office clothing.

At 8:30am I am in the boatshed doing some maintenance. Despite the insulation they installed the shed gets down to -20 in the winter so we have insulated boiler suits we wear so as not to get grease etc over everything.

Through out the day I might be in and out of the boiler suit, my diving dry suit and my boatsuit as I take scientists out on the water.

If there is not too much wind I am back in my gym cloths to run before dinner on the runway at 6pm. Then change into ordinary trousers and shirt for dinner. After dinner it is normally time to go mountaineering, ice climbing or skiing so back to the room to change into outside clothes.

Dessert on a saturday night – sticky toffee pudding… yummy

We have a great view from the cafeteria out over hanger cove and the icebergs in a northerly get all packed in the bay. Normally you can eat dinner while watching seals and penguins go about their business. Last week a pod of Orcas wondered by.

Breakfast is self serve and is cereal, canned fruit, homemade bread for toast it starts at 06:30 and continues till 08:30.

At 10:30 there is a morning smoko which used to be bacon baps however, everyone was putting on so much weight on station we now just eat what ever is in the fridge by the toasters – cold cuts, cheese etc. I have only managed to make it to one smoko since I got here. Normally I am hard at work and don’t want to stop the momentum I have got going on.

Lunch is between 1300 and 1400 and is normally soup and homemade bread and then a pasta dish like lasagna, mac and cheese etc.

Afternoon smoko is at 16:00 and used to include cakes but doesn’t anymore.

Dinner is at 18:30 till 19:30 except on Saturday nights when there is tablecloths a three course meal served at the table and everyone has to dress up.

Food is pretty good but full of carbs and there is really no fresh fruit or veg. Everything comes to the station canned, frozen or dry so the chefs have a tough job to created good food. As you can imagine if there is a bad chef the mood on base gets quite bad!

This morning there were crosswinds from the first flight. Lucky for us there is only one twin otter on base at the moment and the conditions were not good for the Dash 7 to fly. Between Danny and I we had to cover a trip to Leonie for sediment sampling, four SAR calls and a trip the girls wanted to take for some CTD testing all before lunch. It is crazy because we can only have one boat on the wharf at a time and we don’t really have enough crew to pull from. On top of this we needed to finish getting the boat packed up that is going to the falklands. This weekend Danny is on SAR so I have the weekend off and am going on a mini break. On Saturday morning he is going to train some more crew which will give us a little more choice.

The great thing about base life is that the mechs are 250 yards away so when we realised the boat on its trailer was not going to fit in the container we took the boat off and took the trailer for modifications up to the mechs. A day and half later we had a collapsable trailer! All they charge me is hugs! I know it is true the rough tough tech services guys will do anything for me if I give them a hug!

The afternoon was spent putting the remainder of the new stuff that came in on relief into inventory and I turfed all the stuff out of the boats and dried it all out. The safety gear is now in dry bags and hopefully it will stay that way. Next week I will be powerwashing the boats and then will start detailing each one and make this into a permanent thing on the calender.

The boatshed is now organised a little bit better and all the extraneous stuff has been removed – it seemed like it had become a little bit of a dumping ground for people on base! There were things from the air unit, field assistants etc. So basically Danny and I have been spring cleaning.

CTD stands for Conductivity, temperature and Depth this probe is put down to 500m two times a week at Rothera giving scientist lots of information for oceanagraphic study. See a report by the marine assistant in 05

Every morning we have a condensed version of a newspaper at the breakfast table. It is about 6 pages long and includes world, financial, sports news and the weather for all the major cities in the world. There is a crossword puzzle that is normally done by people with time for their morning smoko at 10:30am or those on standby to fly out to the field.

Penguin on monday night with Claire and Adam

It was a busy morning at the boatshed yesterday as we knew the weather would get bad today so we pulled some work forward and took two visiting Malaysian scientists out to Anchorage to collect some soil samples. The scientists are a professor and her masters student – Felix and Irene. Their FA was Ben Tibbets and myself and Danny decided to take the boat together.

We landed on Anchorage amoungst lots of elephant seals which although smelly weren’t that active. However, the skuas were very active so the best thing to do was carry a spade above your head to stop getting attacked by them.

While Danny went looking for the emergency depot to get a GPS co-ordinate and the scientists and FA went off to get soil I stayed at the hut and did some work on it. I took a fully inventory of the contents and also re did the guy wires and dug out the solar panel and a bunch of wires from the snow. It was sunny so I was just in trousers and a light fleece. It was therapeutic work which I enjoyed being out on an island with just the birds and seals surrounding me and great visibility across to all the moutains on the peninsula. When I was done with the work I climbed the hill and took a few photos.

We got back in time for lunch and then continued the normally boat maintenance in the afternoon as Mel wasn’t able to go diving as she had an experiment going on. I thought it would be an early evening however, I got involved at the sewing loft trying to repair the industrial sewing machine that someone broke. It really is needed for getting stuff made on base so as I didn’t finish completing it until well into dinner time I will go back this afternoon.

After dinner Adam, Claire and I went up to Vals and did a few runs. Claire was excited to break in her new skis. With the snow melting so fast it was a bit icy on Vals and it is almost getting to blue ice on the ramp. There was a group doing field training – those that just came in on the Dash – so we stopped in at the Caboose and had cuppa before heading home at 10:30pm. Another great day down south!

Lagoon Hut

Elephant Seals at Lagoon

On monday I went for my fourth dive in Antarctica helping Mel out with a little project. There were quite a large amount of icebergs in south cove as it has been blowing a southerly for a few days. We went down to 12m or so and were down for 40 minutes. My fingers were numb after 5 minutes.

While Mel was measuring the bodies of brittle stars on the grid I was bagging up 50 or so limpets for Mel to shuck and use for feeding the urchins in the aquarium at the bonner lab. I was also bagging up rocks with algae for the limpets already in the aquarium to graze on.

We also had a field party going out to Lagoon to get soil samples for a project. So all in all a busy day. I had taken a recreational trip out to Lagoon on Sunday as I was on Marine SAR duty this weekend. It means I can’t go beyond the hanger as I need to be able to launch the boat within 20 minutes. However, if I am already on the water it is OK.

Landing point at Lagoon

After the trip to Lagoon we waited for the DASH 7 to land bringing in some new scientists for 10 days. It was a beautiful day so it wasn’t a bother waiting. As we were tied up on the wharf I mentioned to my crew that something was just under the surface of the water. A few seconds later a penguin jumped into the boat! It scared the crew and had a waddle around – there was enough time for me to get a quick video! I told Henry on the phone and he said silly aunty ashley – obviously he didn’t believe me.

We were up at the memorial late on Monday night after the great science talk about aerial photography and we hung out for a long time with a penguin which climbed about 250 yards up to join us following our penguin calls. The penguin stopped about 1.5 meters away from us and proceeded to pick up rocks and talk to us.

Dr. Claire is the postmistress on base and has it open in on Monday lunch times. We have our own British Antarctic Territory stamps and also first day covers which I shall grab a few of this coming week. Post coming in is very irregular some came in on the Dash 7 from the Falklands that we were on and then some more on the JCR. The next mail run incoming is not expected until February. We will be sending out next week on the JCR and they will send it out at the end of December. Below is a picture of our mailbox!

On our way down some stamp collectors who specialise in Antartica stamps were on a research visit to the Falklands and they latched onto Claire and asked her to do a talk about being a postmistress in Antartica. Not quite sure what she will be able to say!