Our residence for the night

It’s been over a week since I last posted on here and about the same since I arrived in Antarctica.  Apologies to those who have been badgering me for posts!  These past few days have been extremely busy, filled with briefings, meetings talks and practical lessons.  It’s been busy but at the same time it’s been awesome. 

When we first arrived we encountered some pretty heavy turbulence, which was the worst I’ve ever experience.  It wasn’t so bad that it freaked people out it just made Ian, one of the guys flying down with me, vom all over his sick bag which, for the rest of us, was very amusing.  After we landed we were allocated our cabins which, although small, are very comfortable.  They remind me of the Phase 4 Dartmouth cabins but with en suite and bunk beds.   As it turns out I’m to be sharing the next four months down here with Ian (good job we’re on the ground!) 

At present I have done all of the training I need to do in order to be allowed unrestricted access around the base, which includes skidoo driving and practical field craft.  The main forms of transport around Rothera are Gators or skidoos.  The Gator is a small golf buggy like vehicle used for moving people or small bits and pieces around the base and a skidoo, also known as a ‘doo’, is mainly used for deep field parties moving across the continent for months at a time.  The training we got was simple but effective: push to go forward, push to go backward and if you go too fast you’ll flip’, and that was it.  The guy teaching us, smiler (he never speaks, only smiles and nods), is known at the base as the ‘Doo whisperer’ so we knew we were in good hands. We then had field training to complete which mean going up the Ramp, a large hill opposite the base, onto the plateau behind and camping for the night.  We loaded up a pyramid tent onto our skidoo and took it up to the plateau where we were taught how to construct a basic field position with the tent.  This involved digging a base for the tent to sit in and setting up the HF radio with a set of 5 metre long wires as antenna.  After that we were left to our own devices for the night. Tom and I took our doo further up the mountain side to get some better photos and decided to chow down.  In the rations box, known as a Manfood box, were all sorts of unappetising treats.  All the food is dehydrated so it doesn’t matter about the best before date; the food we were eating expired in 2002.  Yummy.   We decided to go for a three course meal of soup, chilli con carne and oats to finish.  Bad move.  The soup proved to be an interesting choice. After putting one sachet into the water we decided to thicken it with another.  It went instantly from watery to syrupy.  “Awesome, chicken!” Tom exclaimed.  This was powdered soup...  It turned out the ‘chicken’ was congealed lumps of un-dissolved powder.  It was possibly the worst thing ever.  The rest of the food was actually not too bad and I ended up scranning down three other main meals. 

The Ramp with Reptile Ridge at the top



View on the way in to Rothera

The base itself is similar to how I imagined it but not on the same scale.  It’s spread over a far larger area which makes going from work to dinner when there is a 40 knot blizzard blowing a pain in the arse.  Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the fact that the weather is terrible, it’s just tedious getting soaked through sometimes.  The weather at the start of this season has been pretty bad so far.  This time last year all the snow had melted and people were walking round in shorts in a balmy 5 Celsius!  This year there is so much snow we actually have to dig our way out of our accommodation and some second storey windows are covered in snow.  The temperature here hardly rises above -2 celsius, which some may not think is that cold but when you factor in wind chill from 40-50 knot winds it feels like -10.  I’m quite glad that the weather is poor, it makes it seem like I’m experience more of the ‘real’ Antarctica: the snow, the blizzards and the wind are exactly how I imagined it to be and if I’d arrived and found the snow all melted I don’t think I would feel the same way I do now.  


The view from the outside......






....and from inside

 

The best office view in Rothera has to be in the Tower.  From here we can see everything from the south cove, to the ramp, to the icebergs to the North.  This last week has also been spent getting myself and Tom up to speed with the Standard Operating Procedures for flight following and all other Ops work down here for BAS.  Now that we are up to speed and signed off we can get on with the job we were sent to do.  My role as Comms Officer is to flight follow, boating/diving follow, comms with deep field parties and general radio comms around the base.  The flight following is the bulk of the work we do and involves radio checks, passing weather, checking in with aircraft at certain positions and providing information for take off/landings and circuits at Rothera.  Having completed EFT at Barkston, this is all very familiar and has become the most enjoyable part of the work.  With boating and diving ops we do similar tasks as we do for the aircraft: maintaining radio contact, updating them on weather and logging their positions.  The deep field comms is very different to the following we do and could be seen more as an informal radio show.  The guys in the field can be living in a tent collecting data for up to two months and each night it is our job to collect their data and chat to that party.  This can be anything from talking about what’s going on around base, how their favourite sports team did, to what’s going on globally.  These guys will spend so much time away from base that it is good to chat to a different voice once in a while and get some news that doesn’t concern ice samples!



The Tower at New Bransfield

 That’s all for now, I hope it makes up for my long absence.  I will hopefully be able to write more frequently now that I’m settled in here and the next post will possibly be about what I get up to during the day.  To be honest it probably won’t be that interesting so I’ll just write about penguins.  Everybody loves penguins...

A juvenile Emperor penguin

 Some Photos from around base: