Relief

This week was relief. This means that the James Clark Ross (JCR) came in and offloaded nearly all of our necessary consumables, stores and food for a year. In addition to that we had several ships also come in including HMS Clyde with whom we do a fair amount of socialising. It was a fairly shattering week!

It started wonderfully. On Monday as part of my familiarisation Matt needed to show me the way into Morraine Fjord. This is the fjord just the other side of the Cove which has a band of morraine across the opening, making it deadly for anything larger than a Jet Boat. Its lethality is attested to by the wrecks of the Lyn and the Maresco either side of the opening, one on Discovery Point next to Penguin River and the other on Dartmouth Point on the Greene Peninsula. As it was an incredibly beautiful day we had Derren from the museum, Les and Joe, the new sparky, accompanying us. We took the RIB Luna and it felt good to be speeding across the pancake flat sea with the sun beaming down on us. We negotiated the passage easily but I can see how it would be much trickier in any type of swell. After being shown the landing points on this side of the Greene Peninsula we went up to the end of the Fjord to have a look at the two Glaciers that calve into it. Right at the tip is the Harker Glacier and at right angles to that is the Hamburg Glacier. 

Hamburg Glacier

 This was the first time I have ever driven through ice and it is one of the oddest sensations I have ever had. Normally when driving and you hear a ‘thunk’ you stop, have a look over the side to check there is no damage then carefully move around the object. In brash ice there is a ‘thunk’ every five seconds. It was too thick to manoeuvre around every bit of ice so I just had to concentrate on not hitting the bigger bits which would have caused us some problems. When we got closer to the glaciers we turned off our engines and just sat, drifting in the ice with the sun sparkling off the cracks deep in the small ice bergs all around us and glinting off the massive wall of frozen, shattering water that is the snout of the glacier. There was an incredible sound of crackling all around us which was the 1000 year old air that had been trapped in the ice releasing itself on contact with the seawater. We were effectively listening to the ice age. 

Intrepid Explorers!

The next day Matt and I were up and had a RIB in the water by 0800 in case the JCR needed us to take her lines to shore, which apparently they often do. In the end she was worried about the wind getting up so she anchored in the cove and brought all the cargo over by tender. This made everything much slower and fiddlier but we got it all done. It was horrific weather, just to make things slightly trickier. The gale drove the snow and sleet straight into our faces and down the necks of our jackets until by an hour into working cargo we were all soaked and freezing. The passengers on the JCR, visiting scientists and other BAS personnel being delivered to varying bases, all got a chance to come off, including our Doc, Hazel, who is working as the Doc of the JCR till she and John handover in January. She, being the brick that she is, got stuck in and helped unload the food. In the middle of all this frenzied movement of people and two JCB’s carting stuff around there was one weaner who could NOT be persuaded to move out of the centre of the jetty. He resolutely stayed there after several attempts at persuading him that he really would prefer the slipway and in the end acted as the centre of a roundabout with the JCBs carefully manoeuvring around him. It kept us all amused and our spirits up throughout the day. 

Traffic jam on our slipway

I was stationed in the food store, which involved standing in the snow tallying off the pallet upon pallet of dry food goods that came off the JCR. This would have been alright except that I couldn’t wear gloves because otherwise I couldn’t turn the pages of the tally sheets and some of the boxes had been mis-packed so I had to take them off the pallet one by one to get to the numbers. Once they had been tallied off we opened up the boxes and took the food out of it. The food store was soon a flurry of shredded paper and cartons of food whizzing along the floor or through the air from the unpackers to the shelf stackers. Once we had finally finished with the dry food for the day we got the frozen food. Why this wasn’t unloaded first I will never understand but it was unloaded and the JCR stood off into Cumberland Bay for the night because she had to come back for a few more hours the next day. Alnost everyone on base was in the chain gang unpacking, checking, passing and stacking the frozen food and we worked hard at it till 2200. It was my job to call out the numbers for John to check off as the food passed through my hands and for the rest of the night I dreamt in four figure tally sheets.

The next day we started unpacking cargo again at 0745 and the JCR came alongside (it being beautiful weather ironically) to offload the last few bits, a container for the rat eradication team and for us to backload our rubbish, the empty (flatpacked) boxes and other such bits. Once she had gone at 1100 we continued to work hard opening huge boxes of consumables and putting them into their respective piles to be moved to their particular areas later. At 1400 HMS Clyde came in. After clearing the jetty of sun bathing weaners, Sue and I took to the RIB Alert to take her lines for her (she has very high sides and therefore using heaving lines doesn’t really work). I have to say I was slightly nervous about having an audience not only of Base members all standing around waiting for her to come alongside but also a ship full of Naval ratings and officers needing me to be on the ball. We managed it with minimal bother and once she was safely tied up and Alert was back on shore in her trailer we all went back to dealing with cargo.

That night a few of us were invited aboard the Clyde for cheese and wine with the officers in the wardroom. It was very nice but we were all so shattered from our two days of bloody hard work that we struggled a little. I left early since I was on ‘Earlies’ the next day but even leaving early I climbed down the (rather tricky) pilot ladder at 2300.

[As an aside: in the duty rota (every 14 days at the moment) one does a day of earlies, when you get up early to do the rounds to make sure nothing has happened in the night, make bread and then cook the evening meal. You are also in charge of radio comms (communications) if there are any, and making sure that you check in the logging out book that people off base have returned when they said they would. The next day you are on lates when you do the late round checking everything is ok and there are no fire risks etc. To be doing earlies and lates this week just made everything that little more tiring.]

The other social events with the Clyde were a Church service on Thursday (purely because they were carrying a chaplin and we have a church so the two combined happily), some of the crew coming up to our bar for a couple of drinks on Thursday and a football match on Friday (we lost 8:5). It all went extremely well. They were a really nice bunch. We were given a tour of her. She is one of the 4 ships in the Fisheries Protection Fleet. The other three of her class are all in UK waters protecting our fisheries. She is actually “a civilian ship painted grey with a couple of guns stuck on”. She is on lease from BAE systems and is literally a merchant ship painted grey. She is very well thought out though and while not ice strengthened seems to be well suited for the Falklands and South Atlantic. Her crew do a tour in each of the four fisheries protection vessels and this one is a real change for them since in the UK they are conducting boardings and checking for fishing infringements whereas here they are for Falklands protection.

Apart from our social engagements with Clyde Matt and I were kept extremely busy sorting through all the stores that we had received. I think that other than the food stores we had the largest amount of cargo to sort through. We had to check that everything on the packing lists had arrived in the quantities expected. We then had to book everything into a computer program called AMOS. This program basically rules the technical services and boatys’ lives. It tells us when to conduct routine maintenance, it holds details of the amounts and locations of all our stores and the stores we need and have ordered. When it works it is a good system but, as with all computer programs, it can be temperamental and infuriating. The boathouse still looks like we are in the middle of a jumble sale and will do until we have booked everything in, put it all away and finally sorted it back into what it should look like when everyone’s cargo hasn’t been dumped in it.

The lighter side of relief was that all the winterers got their ‘P’ (personal) boxes with goodies and necessaries that we had consigned to the JCR back in September before we left the UK. The things that have come out of my P box have made my pitroom a little more homely. Just the ability to hear music from my tiny speaker has made it much more ‘mine’.

As an end to this week everyone has had a pretty relaxed weekend. I went over to Maiviken with Alistair since he was going to help Daniel map a Gentoo Penguin colony. Daniel has to do the walk over to Maiviken and do the ‘seal round’ every other day for about two and a half months and I am not surprised that he looks shattered. Walking in snowshoes is fun but still rather tiring and I welcomed the cup of tea at the hut. After Daniel had done his seal round we went to the Gentoo colony and saw some of the chicks. At this young stage they look rather like bald pterodactyls with heads so heavy that they can hardly hold them up. They are wonderful balls of fluff though and very sweet. After seeing them and the groups of furry pups on the beach I can’t wait to help with pup and chick weighing which will start happening early next year. 

Gentoo parent and chick

 Next week will hopefully be less hectic but I am sure that surprises will continue to keep cropping up and I am already looking forward to it all.

Uncharted Territory

Travel in the modern day, even in the wild areas of Europe, has been made unbelievably easier due to the amount of information available on maps easily bought, which have been surveyed and ground-truthed over a couple of centuries by professionals whose sole job it is to improve and add to the knowledge already present. For example, the entirety of the UK is covered by 1:25 Ordinance Survey maps which have contours at every 10m and can show the presence of even tiny bridges over insignificant streams in the middle of the highlands.  I thought, while on expedition to Arctic Norway this summer, that the 1:50 maps we had there were tricky enough. These only have contours every 20m which means that there could be (and very often were) several 19.5m high hills in between the contour lines that you couldn’t guess at on the map but were very much there on the ground,  as attested to by our aching legs.

This was nothing compared to the mapping down here. I knew I was in for something different in my interview when my boss, Les, put in front of me a marine chart which looked completely normal until I noticed the “uncharted waters” sections in various parts of it. And this was the most up to date chart we have. People have been sailing around South Georgia since Cook, and therefore the charts of its waters are actually fairly good; they had to be for the whalers and sealers not to wreck themselves every time they came in. But yet still there are “uncharted waters”! This is nothing compared to the land. Other than the areas immediately around the whaling and sealing stations and, in more modern times, the areas around KEP  held by the military, very little on land had been mapped.

We use maps which look rather like some of my childish creations whilst inventing new countries with “Here be dragons” and “Giant’s land” scrawled across them in my neatest scribble. The people who produce these maps are actually real professionals working under extremely difficult conditions to create maps for use by BAS scientists. MAGIC (the Mapping and Geographic Information Centre (one of my favourite BAS group names)) use the latest techniques with the most up to date technology possible and yet still we have maps which have 50m contour lines, hiding huge hills inside their innocuous lines. I walked over Deadman’s Pass yesterday to Maiviken. Before I set off, as usual, I had a look at the map to see where I was going and the terrain I could expect. The Pass looked flat with one easy contour line up its side and I thought that it should take me about forty five minutes. The truth on the ground was brought home to me in an hour and a half of up and down hill toil along Bore ‘Valley’ (the term is used loosely) in snowshoes facing into a driving wind.

Even the slopes which do have contour lines on them are much harder than you would expect from the key on the map because “scree” in the UK and scree here are two completely different beasts. Scree in the UK, while tricky, is usually not a problem because it is generally on the slopes that most people don’t climb, unless they really know what they are doing. But here, because of the freeze-thaw effect, the scree covers every slope and if you want to get anywhere you will eventually find yourselves on your hands and knees negotiating a tricky patch. Last weekend Les and I walked up Osmic Hill. This is considered an average hill in SG and an easy day out. It took us an hour and a half to get solely to its foot and that included wading through Penguin River up to our thighs in glacial melt water. While climbing up a relatively gentle but scree covered slope I realised that an average hill here is nothing of the sort. In climbing one is told “ keep three points of contact at all times (ie two feet and a hand or two hands and a foot)” This is simple advice but when two and a half of those points of contact are coming away in your hand or from under your foot it is easier said than done!

It does send a frisson of excitement down my spine every time I look at a chart or a map here and see a blank. It gives me a real feeling of kinship with the explorers of the Golden Age when, after a certain point, every step was on new and uncharted territory. Most of the ground that I will cover here has in reality been travelled over, whether by BAS or military personnel, but every so often I will find myself somewhere new and finally when I explore “uncharted waters” in my dreams, my reality is not as far removed as it once was.

A Walk on the Wild Side

Let me take you for a stroll through the neighbourhood. As you leave KEP walking

along the track to Grytviken one comes across Weaners sprinkled liberally all along

the track. These lardy sausages are so sweet. They will either stay fast asleep as you

walk past them with their eyes very tightly shut, very fast asleep or they can look at

you with their big wet eyes, generally lolling on their side. They can also take great

umbrage at your daring to pass by them and those that do will rear up as round as their

fat bodies will allow them and lean precariously towards you with their mouths wide

open. Now this is meant to be threatening but since they have no teeth or they have

tiny stubs and they quite often blow raspberries at you while they are doing this all

you can say is “awww” and walk by smiling. I watched one yesterday wake up from

its nap and need a scratch, it was on its side so it tried to roll onto its back but had

forgotten it was on the slope of the beach and so rolled over and over until it hit the

water. It looked so disgusted and embarrassed that I had to stop what I was doing in

the boat house and sit down I was laughing so hard.

Now is the time that they are beginning to learn how to swim. This involves lying

in the shallows with their backs showing. They then put their head underwater and

blow bubbles. Once they have mastered the underwater bubble blowing they propel

themselves along the bottom with their flippers touching the substrate with their

whiskers feeling everything. It reminds me of nothing more than a small child playing

in the shallow end of the pool. When there are a number of them in the shallows

this results in ‘Weaner soup’ with bodies bumping gently into each other and lots of

bubbles being blown. It is a very sweet sight. I was at Penguin River yesterday and

there was a Weaner ‘paddling pool’ where they were learning and playing. I crouched

at the side of it and one braver chap than the others came over to see what I was and

blew bubbles at me from practically underneath my feet.

As you continue along the track if you are lucky you will see some King Penguins

walking, stiff backed, towards you. They will let you get quite close and one has to

resist the urge to shake them by the ‘hand’. They begin to panic a little as you get

about 3 feet from them but once you are past they continue in their stately way with

only a few worried backward glances. Because of the time of year, along the track are

also to be found Furries lying either side spread amidst the weaners. The ones on the

track are generally quite sedate but I would not venture anywhere beyond Grytviken

on a beach without a bodger. This fact can make your choice of route to Penguin

river and beyond a difficult one. You can either take the boggy, hilly path up into

Brown Flats and cross safely there or you can take the route along the shore. Brown

Flats does have its own animal difficulties though. There are Antarctic Terns nesting

among the grass there and if they think you are endangering their nests (and they can

think this from a very long distance away) they will come and dive bomb you. They

will either perform a ‘dirty protest’ and poo on your head or they can actually hit you

with their beaks. They have been known to draw blood but it is mainly the swooping

and calling right next to your ear which is unnerving.

The other choice, along the beach, can be a nerve-wracking one. To get anywhere

either on the beach itself or in the tussock that grows along it you have to really have

your wits about you. Why? Have you ever been charged at high speed by a huge

and incredibly vicious cross between a Pitbull and a Wolf which is roaring like an

underfed lion while you are trying to keep your footing on a slippery stepping stone,

trying not to step on an oversized pug, waving a stick at said vicious dog and keeping

an eye out for its younger, faster, brother on your other side while actually trying

to make progress through an area? No? Then you can have no idea what it is like

standing on a tussock, trying to watch your feet so you don’t step on a weaner, being

charged at by a big male Furry who DEFINITELY doesn’t want you in its territory

while trying to keep an eye out for the teenage Furries who like to sleep in the tussock

and don’t like to be woken. The only time you really have to watch out is if you don’t

see one in time in the tussock or if you think that the big male you just past may want

to catch you up from behind. It can be an exhilarating experience to say the least.

However the Furries aren’t all bad. I walked to Grytviken two days ago and saw a

heavily pregnant female on the side of the track. Half an hour later when I came back

I heard a great mewing and calling and saw that she had given birth to a small bundle

of slightly damp black fur which was mewling away asking to be fed. It was the

sweetest thing. I passed it again today and it is already twice the size it was on Friday

and a little more adventurous. It played hide and seek with me while the mother just

lay watching. This is a great time for births and everyday now will see more and more

of these little ones appearing and I for one plan on losing my heart to each and every

one of them.

Hide and Seek

Cuddles with Mum

Underwater Weaner

Weaner playing with my camera (video)

King at Grytviken