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!

Pilot Mark my instructor!
On Friday I flew down to Fossil Bluff. We were attempting to put Clive and Kevin into Mars Oasis for Kevin’s field project. Unfortunately the contrast wasn’t great so instead we dropped them off at Fossil Bluff.

I will have more pictures later of the cabin at Fossil Bluff it really is something. I am really in love with it and even got to do the final approach to landing at Rothera and did the controls to within 50 feet of landing. The pilots down here are awesome and really into teaching if you want to learn. I have a bunch of books coming down to start reading up for my PPL.

The crevassing in one section of the flight was amazing. This picture shows crevasses that are about 100 feet deep. We were 100 feet above the deck.

Picture taken by Claire of our trip up Stork. Myself with Clive uphill of me.

Very early this morning the R/V Palmer tied up at the wharf to unload some science gear for the LARISSA project. The LARsen Ice Shelf System, Antarctica (LARISSA) project is an NSF-funded interdisciplinary project that will try to study as many aspects as possible of ice shelf ecosystems on the heels of the 2002 collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. Last week an American twin otter came into base and will be based here for two months supporting the LARISSA project. A group of us spent the morning taking american’s from the ship for a tour of the base and also I manned the base store. They also got a tour of the aquarium and dive store courtesy of Mel and JJ. They were only on base for 4 hours while the crew of the ship unloaded containers, skidoos an science equipment.

This afternoon everyone is inside watching movies or going to the gym as a large low has come in bringing 40 knot winds and driving snow. This is when a nice indoor fireplace would be lovely. I am writing and working on organising my photos. Quite relaxing after a long busy week!

This is a picture of the Sea Spider I brought up on my last dive in the Aquarium in the Bonner Lab. He was quite hard to bring up and is the biggest the marine biologists have seen in the year they have been here. It was quite hard to surface from 20m while holding onto a spider in one hand and a seal prod in the other but I managed to do it without damaging him so was very happy.