In at the Deep End

The day we arrived at KEP I woke up to find South Georgia going past my cabin window. The cliffs were black and foreboding, rising sheer out of the water into snow and mist above, obscuring the peaks. We rounded the corner at Hope Point to get our first glimpse of the base; home for the next year and more. The base itself is a collection of long low buildings hugging the beach with shipping containers scattered in between them. We tied up at the wharf with the people ashore helping us with lines. All along the beach were lying hundreds of Elephant seals. Huge beachmasters with ponderous noses, smaller females and in between them were the weaners; pups, growing fast and now huge sausage shaped balls of fat lounging, almost unable to move on the beach. These wonderful creatures are to be my close neighbours until they head off back to sea after the breeding season.

This was the moment of truth. I was about to step onto South Georgia and meet some of those who I would be spending the next year with, some whom would be leaving in a month and some in several months time. It was all rather blur of faces and names and handshakes but in the end I found myself standing in the dining room with everyone, having ‘Smokoe’ (coffee (in the morning)/tea (in the afternoon)). After that the day passed into a blur of familiarisation and training. The next time I could think I was walking with Rod (new BC), James (old BC), Daniel (seal man) and Paula (the other boating officer) on the track to Grytviken. This is an old whaling station 15mins round the bay. It is here that the only church on the island stands and that the South Georgia Heritage Trust (SGHT) has a tiny museum.

Grytviken is now a much smaller whaling station than it was because many of the structures were taken down before they fell on an unsuspecting tourist’s head. A fair few of the buildings are still there as are three old whalers that have been pulled up on the beach. These are rust buckets which are too dangerous to climb on but which give you an idea of the scale of the operations. These small vessels were what went out to sea to catch the whales and bring them back to the station for processing. I will describe Grytivken in more detail in a later blog

That night Matt (the Senior Boating Officer) took me along as an observer for a night pick up of Sue (new fish scientist) and Katie (old fish scientist) from the Pharos which had taken them for a plankton trawl of the bay. Night ops here are a very different beast from night ops in the UK. We had to have someone working the ice light for a start. This is effectively a search light which will pick out the gleam of ice in the water to give the coxswain a chance of missing it. Also there are no lights until we rounded Hope point and saw the loom of the Pharos’ ice light winking on her foredeck. The pick up was pretty easy and I got to see how Matt does it which was useful since he has been here for two years now and knows all the tips and tricks of picking up from a pilot ladder. 

Picking people up and dropping people off on ships will be largely the bread and butter of my work down here. The boatys are here basically to support the Government Officers (GOs) in getting them to the ships they need to inspect. The rest of the work is supporting any work that the GOs or the SGHT need done on shore (rat eradication etc), supporting any BAS science and then supporting recreation: getting our Base mates out to differing parts of the Barff or Greene Peninsula’s for their holidays.

Night ops is a slightly unusual event here and I was therefore very lucky to get to do one on my first night.

On Wednesday I got to do another unusual thing in an extended boating trip. We needed to take Pat (a GO (there are always 2 on the island, Keiron is the other one here at the moment, he came in on the Pharos with us)), Pecker, the chief builder and Liz, an architect, round to Stromness whaling station to look at the potential for maintenance of the Managers villa there. Normally there is a 200m exclusion zone around all the whaling stations due to the old tin roofs that could fly off in a gust of wind and the asbestos in the buildings. However, we had a permit so we could go ashore. We took the 3 mentioned above, John the Doc as the RIB cox, Matt as Harbour Launch Cox and myself. We took the Launch Pipit and the RIB Luna, loaded them up with all the kit we needed and headed round the corner to the North. Out of the normal boating limits we sped at a healthy 16kts along the same coast line as we had passed a few days earlier on the Pharos.

Extremely unusually and incredibly luckily we were allowed to tie up alongside the old wharf at Stromness which meant that everyone could disembark and have a look around the station there (normally the boaty has to stay at anchor watch). The first thing that hit me was the smell. It is the beginning of Fur Seal season and the males are starting to come ashore to create their territories and wait for the females to start the breeding season. The whole whaling station is a very ‘Furry’ area and the sweet, sickly, musky smell hits you hard in the nose with a wallop. Furries can be a problem and have been known to bite people pretty badly. This means that you have to have your wits about you and a ‘bodger’. This is a stick with which you can tap the ground in front of an aggressive Furry to make him (it is usually the males) back off. The smell comes in useful when among tussock grass or buildings because it alerts one to the presence of potential trouble before you can see it.

The manager’s villa that we had come to see was the one which Shackleton stayed in after he crossed the mountain range from the other side of the island. It is in fairly poor condition, along with the rest of the station but has been boarded up now to try and protect it somewhat from the elements. We wandered around the rest of the station while Liz did all she needed to on the villa. It was really quite eerie to see this ghost town, dilapidated and derelict with thick snow falling all around us. It added a real dream like quality to the place, especially when we saw the old cinema (a ruin) with the old projector still inside, albeit on its side now. We went into an engineering workshop which had a forge, steel rollers and a welding shop. There were store rooms stuffed with sheet after sheet of steel standing leaning against each other, filling the room; or pipes of all different gauges ranged along the wall. Basically anything necessary to repair or even rebuild a ship was there. There was also the human touch, with a leather welding mask sitting on the side waiting to be used once more. You could almost forget the reason for the presence of the station on the island until I noticed a rope ‘spout’ lying ready to be fixed back onto a whaler. It was a lid for the whale rope hatch with spout lined with wood to allow the easy progress of the rope once it had fired into the whale with the harpoon. A beautiful bit of engineering with a deadly purpose.

Once Liz had finished at Stromness we went round the corner to Husvik, another whaling station, where we dropped them off and stood off at anchor. By the time they had finished there the weather had cleared and it was late so we headed home with myself and John on the RIB. Speeding in the wake of the Jet boat I would have sworn that the Cape Petrel that was skimming just above the wave produced by her wake was doing so simply for the fun of it. As we went round the corner I had the leisure to watch the coast go by. The black foreboding cliffs were transformed by the sun into green but they still rose sheer, to cut the blue of the sky. The joy of the petrel, the thrill of travel and of seeing icebergs 10-20 miles off our port quarter and the daring of the cliffs to our right gave me the feeling that one could be challenged for survival here and it made me feel just a little more alive.

In my first week of being here I’ve had to throw myself into two unusual events for the base, I’ve had to show I could adapt and overcome challenges (having never reversed a trailer before I had to put the RIB back into a very tight boat shed) and I have managed to prove to myself that I can do this and I do deserve to be here. It has been an incredibly busy week but after jumping in at the deep end. I have found I can still swim.