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.