Ships ahoy!

6 weeks!  6 weeks left and then I’m back in the UK!  The time that I’ve spent down here has gone by so quickly that it’s a bit strange to think that we are over halfway in our stay here.  I’m starting to look forward to coming back, not because I’m getting bored but because of the things that I miss.  Just simple things like taking the dogs for a walk in the woods and seeing trees and grass instead of snow and ice.  The weirdest thing that I miss is my car.  Not because I’m in love with my car or anything weird like that, but because it’s become a symbol of independence.  Being able to do what you want, go where you want and do it when you want is something that you don’t get down here and it’s something I’m looking forward to the most when I get home. 

When I signed off from my last post I was about to go boating in the waters around Rothera.  We went round a few of the local islands and got to see some of the local wildlife up close.  We stopped on one island that had a colony of blue eyed shags and their chicks and it was amazing but it also smelt terrible.  It was probably a cross between a corpse and wet phys kit – the smell of someone who had been exercising very hard but had then keeled over due to poor health.  We then went on to one of the larger islands where we have a little hut set up for overnight trips and for those trips the winterers go on.  The island itself was only about a mile across but it had an abundance of wildlife which included a whole variety of seals, birds and penguins.  Again it smelt like the first island.  All I can imagine is that there is a group of highly unfit people touring round the islands off Rothera and dying, leaving an unbearable smell...



Elephant Seals fighting on Lagoon.



Blue Eyed Shags and chicks.

A couple of days ago Tom and I completed our Module 3 Field training, which is an advanced look at travelling across crevassed areas and crevasse rescue.  It consists of a lot of abseiling and ascending using ropes, snow anchors and general mountaineering.   This was all in preparation for going up to the radio repeater buttress on top of Reptile Ridge and swapping over the batteries.  O to the M to the G.  We had to shift eight batteries which were similar to the ones in cars and weighed a fabulous 32kg each.  What the hell...  I never want to see those bastard things again.  Ever.  The worst part about it was that the snow on top of the ridge was all sugary and you sank up to your knees whenever you walked anywhere and with an extra 32kgs added you sank even further.  I can’t complain too much though as we were spared the horrors of lugging them to the top of the Ridge by the Helicopters of the Polar Stern.  The Polar Stern is a German science ship similar to the ones that BAS operate and it had decided to pay us a visit for the day, which meant we were able to be quite cheeky and pinch their helicopters.  They were only small five seat things but they did the job and it was pretty cool to get airlifted up and it meant I got to see the base from a completely different perspective.  For all the grumbling and cursing Tom and I did whilst shifting those things we had a truly awesome time and it definitely beats working in the office hands down. 

On the Ridge with the repeater in the background.

In the Crevasse below Reptile Ridge.

At the time of writing, the Laurence M Gould an American science ship is alongside the wharf here at Rothera and tonight is the legendary Gould night.  The Gould visits Rothera each year and the base tries to make it into a big occasion which helps keep morale high.  Today half the base went onboard and went for a trip around the local islands for half the day.  Some of the more dedicated (for dedicated read unfortunate) ones of us had work to do and so I’ve been stuck flight following in the tower all morning.  I’ve just been chatting to Mike out of my cabin window after he arrived back from his jolly and he was carrying a coke cup, the sort you get in McDonalds.  Not fair!  It turns out they have a free coke vending machine on board and they also have as much cookies as you can eat.  It just keeps getting better...  Then he said they had fillet steak with asparagus for lunch with white magnums for dessert.  I could have punched him!  Luckily for him I couldn’t reach him. 

Next on the agenda for today is the annual football (not soccer...) match, where the Gould ask for a good spanking and we happily oblige.  Then we play the match...  I was chatting to some of the guys when Doug brought them up and showed them the tower and they were telling me that they know they are going to lose but they just play to humour us.  Looking at the preparation that’s gone into the match it does make me laugh: the football team has spent the last month in training for this day in order to play a team of people who don’t play the sport and haven’t got the space to even run on the deck.  I don’t know what we’re worried about, still, I guess it would be pretty funny if we then went and lost...

Tonight is the night to end all nights.  The infamous, within BAS, Gould night party in the Garage.  Basically it’s the same as New Year’s except bigger because of the addition of about 30 or so people from the Gould.  It’s also legendary because of the number of new females on base which means that sharking levels go through the roof.  Supposedly the day after Gould night is the worst for morale as all the men on base who are hoping to get lucky fail miserably and wake up with nothing to show but a sore head.  Tonight is also the night that the Dom Savage Experience plays their biggest gig.  We’ve learnt even more songs and remember to save some back for an encore so that we don’t look like a bunch of specials – again...  We are also changing the name to The Ross No More Project in honour of Ross who, unfortunately, has been sent to Sky Blu for a few weeks much to his disappointment.  Hopefully everything will all go to plan and I’ll maybe have a few stories to tell when I next write – the less incriminating the better...

A few photos of the local residents:

Adelie and Elie.

Does my bum look big in this...

Shag parents with chick.

Happy belated New Year! I hope everyone had a great time and by now are thinking about giving up their New Year’s resolutions!  Come to think of it, I haven’t thought of any for this coming year.  I don’t know what I could have; possibly to have a more positive, assertive attitude towards things – especially my flying.  That was one thing I was told I needed to improve: confidence.  I need to switch on the part of my brain that tells me to get on with what I know is the right course of action instead of trying to please the instructor.  Anyway, enough of that talk!  Antarctica!  Wahey!  Everything down here is still ticking along nicely and I’m loving my time here.  When I first heard I was going down to Antarctica I thought that I would get about halfway through my stay and start to wish I could come back but on the contrary I’m really enjoying my time here and haven’t really noticed the time spent away from home (that’s not to say I’m not missing you Mum...).  I also think that staying for a winter down here wouldn’t be as bad as I first thought it would.  I realise that I say that knowing that I’m leaving in two months and that I have a job to get back to in the ‘real’ world, but all the same I think it would be fun especially with the people who will be wintering this year. 

New Year’s here was an awesome couple of days.  As I said in my last post we had the 10km race on the runway on New Year’s Eve which was tough but definitely a good laugh.  Quite a few people turned out which was really good and the weather was perfect: no wind and just hot enough to be able to run without overheating.  As everyone started turning up at the start, Tom and I were trying to work out the competition.  We hadn’t seen half the people who turned up run before but some of them had the racing snake figure about them which worried me and annoyed Tom: “Where’re all the short guys with small legs that I can race against?”  I’ve never run 10km before so I was pretty nervous about getting my pace right and on top of that Steve, the MET forecaster, had been going round telling people that I was one of the favourites.  Cheers Steve, no pressure...  The race itself was pretty standard, as soon as the starting flare went off we all legged it, all apart from Dave Boat.  He thought the opportune moment to relieve himself would be as we were lining up under starter’s orders.  As the flare went off he turned round to find everybody had started and he was left with his trousers round his ankles, so to speak – that is to say he’s not an 8 year old boy...  As soon as I’d set off I took the lead and instantly regretted it.  I thought that some of the other guys would have gone with me but they were behind by a good few meters which made me think I’d set off too fast.  I started having visions of being overtaken by everyone and then hoofing my guts up halfway round.  Not cool.  Fortunately that didn’t happen and I led the race for its entirety and finished first with a time of 40:14 minutes which beat the previous year’s winner.  Tom came in fourth which was a good performance considering how many lanky racing snakes there were running.  I was pretty happy with my time considering I’d never run over that distance before and I’d set myself the target of 40 minutes + or – 2 minutes, which I managed to achieve.  I’m not going to lie, I won’t be doing it again in a hurry.  Tom and I had been in the gym the previous day and had inadvertently worked out our legs.  Yeah - smooth move idiots.  We were in pain.  So much pain...

That evening we had the New Year’s Eve party in the garage and it was such a good night.  All the Vehicle Mechs had spent all of New Year’s Eve afternoon preparing the garage ready for the night and it looked great.  A bar had been set up in one corner and the stage was along the side where the doors were which meant that there was quite a roomy dance floor in the middle.  The guys had even bin bagged all the windows up to stop any light getting in and make it feel more like night which actually makes a big difference out here.  Then it was the moment that everyone had been waiting for: the debut performance of the Dominic Savage Experience, and boy what an experience!  Without being arrogant we were better than I expected us to be and everyone loved it.  We did make a few cock ups, mainly my fault, but no one noticed – except for the acoustic set where we were halfway through and our music fell off the stand.  Bollocks.  Then the heckling began, all in good spirit of course...  We also managed to get people dancing instead of standing and watching so that was all good and we even got an encore – although we didn’t have a song prepared.  Whoops...  The rest of the night was a bit of a blur due to the ridiculously alcoholic cocktails that JJ was making behind the bar but I do remember thinking it a good idea to try and move an avtur drum until I sliced my thumb.  It was open and we were using it as a bin so it was effectively a giant baked bean can.  Ross and I, very much intoxicated, decided that three plasters would do the job... which it did. 

Life in the Tower has been pretty intense over the last week as we were missing Karen who was at Fossil Bluff for a bit of R&R.  It seems that when people wear themselves down and need to recharge their batteries they are sent to the holiday camp that is Fossil Bluff.  This, I can say from experience, will definitely recharge anyone who has been feeling the pressures of work.  The trouble for me was that I went fairly early on in the season before I had the chance to become stressed.  Luckily I haven’t felt that I’ve got anywhere near that stage yet, touch wood.  All this isn’t to say that Karen has been stressed at work, far from it; Karen worked at Halley, the other BAS station in Antarctica, for 18 months doing this job so she’s seen it all.  She was at the Bluff for two weeks and had a really good time, and like everyone who comes arrives at Rothera from the Bluff she didn’t want to come back.  Now that she is back though, we will have five of us working in the Tower which means we might start to get the occasional day off a week. Yay!  At the moment we are working around 14 hour days, every day without any days off.  We do get a morning or an afternoon off sometimes but we don’t get a full day to ourselves which can be slightly annoying.  It also means that you start forgetting what day it is because every day is the same and starts to blend into one.  Groundhog day, much? 

On the subject of Karen coming back, we’ve also had a group of VIPs arrive on station and stay for the last two days on a whistle stop tour.  The group was comprised of a few men from the House of Lords who hold a lot of sway with the amount of funding BAS receives from the Government so it was a very important visit.  They were due to be in earlier and stay for longer but due to adverse weather they were delayed and it was touch and go as to whether they would actually come at all.  Tom and I were told we would be talking to them about the connection of BAS and the Navy and how it was such a great opportunity for us to come down.  Tom, as the Senior Naval Officer on the Continent, instructed me to have a shave and smarten myself in anticipation of their arrival. They arrived.  They didn’t talk to us...  Fantastic.  To cap off their visit, we had a formal dinner last night which Tom and I were apparently not invited to.  The meal began at 8pm and went on for about two hours with a Greek theme and the Chefs had really pulled out all the stops to impress the VIPs.  Unfortunately Tom and I were on duty from 7pm and ended up working until 10:30pm at which point we cracked and asked Mike to cover us whilst we went for dinner.  Usually dinner is served at 6:30pm which means that you can get something to eat before hand over for the late shift but, because dinner started an hour and a half later, Tom and I wouldn’t be able to eat until we had finished our shift.  With the night shifts you can be working anywhere between 10 minutes to all night depending on the state of flying.  This isn’t too bad because you will have eaten before your shift and will usually have the next morning off.  However on this occasion we hadn’t.  We had to wait until all flying had finished which it did at around 11pm.  By the time we got into dinner everyone had finished their meals and were sitting chatting and having coffees.  We had meals put aside for us so it was just a case of sitting and chowing down and by this stage we were pretty hungry.  What did start to annoy me though was people asking why we were so late and whether we’d forgotten the meal was on.  Ok, people think about it: if we’d forgotten the formal meal was on later in the evening surely we would have turned up at the normal 6:30pm time for dinner and then been told that it was on later.  It’s amazing how many people on base don’t realise that people in ops are working all day, every day, regardless of VIPs and fancy meals.  Douche bags...  Right!  Glad that’s off my chest!

When we have had some free time, Tom and I have been making the most of it.  Yesterday we went and visited the crevasse that the GAs use for training up near Reptile Ridge.  It was absolutely amazing.  There were only a couple of us and it was one of the most amazing things I’ve done since I’ve been down here.  To get into the crevasse we had to abseil about 8 meters down an extremely thin ice chute which, I’m not going to lie, was very claustrophobic.  Once at the bottom the crevasse opened out into a big cavern of ice with tunnels and passages created by melting water branching of in all directions.  We then went down one of the passages which became increasingly smaller and smaller and resulted in me breaking off all the icicles with my head and them going down my back – result!  The rest of the time down there was spent sliding around a lot and squeezing through smaller and smaller holes.  We also went skiing earlier today which I’m still coming to grips with.  I’m still yet to see the appeal in paying money to go to somewhere cold and wet and then to strap planks to your feet and slide down a very long hill – and if you’re like me eat snow a lot.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m starting to come round to skiing and it is really good fun but I’m being paid to do it which makes all the difference.  At the mo I’ve passed the snow plough stage and I’m now trying to turn.  Unsuccessfully...  With dire consequences...  I start a turn then my body doesn’t want to continue with it so I end up going supersonic straight down the slope before smashing my face into snow.  I had to be checked over by Vicky, the Doc, for concusion.  I got up and carried on skiing but my wipeout was of biblical proportions and those watching thought I may have died...  Better safe than sorry. 

Better sign off here.  I’m up in the Tower with nothing to do but it’s Sunday brunch in a bizzle so I’m off to fill my face with delicious fried food.  Then a cheeky bit of time on the boats out around the Islands and maybe, if I’m lucky, a snooze...