Chicks and Balloons

We have had another exceedingly busy week. It was certainly noticeable that some of us had walked or run half a mountainous marathon on Sunday. There were more than one or two of us with limps or who found it trickier than normal to get up out of chairs or in my case out of bed. 

We started the week by taking the three soil beakers (or microbial scientists as they would normally be called) to Sorling so they could sample the lower end of the Barff peninsula. They are going to have a bit of a slog over to St Andrews Bay which is a 6/7 hour walk or so. It was tougher on the way back than on the way there because they had soil samples in their packs as well. Oh the joys of being a scientist. The Commissioner, Nigel Heywood, who has been visiting for the past week, made an announcement at our Monday Morning Meeting declaring an increased level of protection for the MPA (Marine Protected Area). There are increased spatial and temporal restrictions, especially on the krill fishery, to avoid competition between the fishing vessels and the predators  such as penguins and fur seals which depend on the krill. This makes South Georgia one of the most protected areas in the world. 

On Tuesday the Agulhas II came into the cove on a good will visit. She is South Africa’s new research vessel and by all accounts is state of the art. Unfortunately I was running boating and so couldn’t go aboard but according to the people who did she is pretty impressive. I managed to slightly twist their new boarding ladder (not permanently) and shouted sorry to the officer  at the top. He told me not to worry and that it needed testing anyway, not quite the answer I was looking for but at least I was useful.

 On Tuesday we also temporarily lost two members of base. Sue, Daniel and Katie (who is now working for the government) went on board the Fishing Vessel Sil to do a groundfish survey around the island. The data that they get from this fishing survey will go to CCAMLAR (Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources) and from this CCAMLAR will give the South Georgian government quotas for the three commercial species: Patagonian Toothfish, Icefish and Krill. The quotas are then reduced again slightly (to ensure sustainability) and this final number is given to the vessels which fish in these waters. So as you can see the groundfish survey is very important to the government and to the continued sustainability of the fishery. An interesting development has just arisen over this survey. Argentina does not recognise the South Georgian Government and has declared to CCAMLAR that it intends to do its own groundfish survey in our waters.  They will not come into King Edward Cove as every fishing vessel must for inspection and clearance and according to the laws of South Georgia they will be fishing illegally. Now this not only appears to be a deliberately provocative act by the Argentinean government but also could have huge implications on the fishery since CCAMLAR has to take the latest data to decide the quotas. This means that if the Argentineans use different protocols to our survey their data could be drastically different, and could massively reduce CCAMLAR’s quotas based on that data, thereby damaging the fishery and the main source of income for the South Georgian government. If the Argentineans do conduct their own survey we will probably have to conduct one even later (probably just before the deadline for data) to ensure that the correct data gets sent in to CCAMLAR and the fishery is properly managed. The Argentinians have declared that they will be doing this at exactly the same time as the Falkland Islands will be holding their referendum on whether they want to stay British or become independent. We are avidly awaiting developments. 

On the Sil were also 5 meteorologists who came off onto base. They are here to do some experiments and observations. They release a balloon with a radiosonde (a piece of kit that measures location, height, humidity, windspeed, etc) attached. These balloons are made of latex and filled with helium till they are about 1.5/2m in diameter. They are released and increase in size with the decrease in pressure as they rise. They generally burst at the 32,000km region when they are about 11m in diameter. It is a fairly impressive thought. The team also hope to fly a UAV (essentially a small plane) with a whole load of instruments on board to gain a more detailed local view of things. Unfortunately they haven’t yet managed to launch the plane due to technical difficulties but these are being worked on as I write. 

Paula and John release a balloon

 On Saturday we awoke to a very surprising 3.5inches of snow on the ground and more falling. It is summer for pity’s sake!! It was quite warm with the snow so it very soon turned to slush and we all had to get the wellies out to reduce wet feet syndrome. In the afternoon we went to collect the soil beakers and the sun had come out by then. It was incredibly and austerely beautiful seeing the snow on the hills and having to make our way slowly through pancake ice (from the freeze the previous night) and brash ice (from the bergs breaking up in the warm weather we have been having in the past few days). As we went along there were Wilson’s Storm Petrels (a black and white bird the size of a swallow) all around us. I am not entirely sure what they were doing but they would get very close to the surface of the water and then put their legs down and seemingly dance on the surface as if they were practising steps for a ballet. It was wonderful. That and the deep deep blue of the inside of the bergs where cracks were forming just made my heart sing and not for the first or last time I found myself amazed that I actually get paid to do this job. 

On Saturday we also gained the last member of our wintering team. Hazel Woodland came in from the JCR. She has been the doc on board since October and swapped yesterday to become our doc while John has gone on board to become the JCR’s doc till the end of the season. Poor Hazel, who has been waking up at 0200 for the past few days to help with science going on at that time, arrived to a big Saturday Night. Sarah made reindeer pate and Joe then BBQ’d reindeer and it was absolutely delicious. That was all fine but then when we moved from the dining room to the bar things began to get a little rowdy and though suffering a fair amount of sleep deprivation she battled cheerfully on, trying to hear conversations with the music creeping ever louder, but in the end had to admit defeat and go to bed. I thought she did very well since it must have been remarkably overwhelming. 

On Sunday morning I led a team (some bright eyed and bushy tailed, others, slightly less so after the bar last night) over to Maiviken to do Gentoo chick weighing. I was in charge of it because Daniel, who should be in charge, had to go on the groundfish survey. Luckily at this stage of their lives the chicks all crèche for safety and so they were very easy to find. Unluckily however they were crecheing in the muddiest, foulest part of Maiviken. We got into oilies and joined the fray. We decided to try and catch them the old fashioned way: choose your penguin and then try and catch it, gently pinning its wings to its side to minimise damage both to you and it. It was so foul and so slippery that I found myself at one point with a penguin in my arms, holding it off the ground, as we both skidded about 2/3m in the mud. When we stopped the penguin and I just looked at each other. I was covered from head to foot in glop and didn’t realise quite how bad my face was till I returned home and had a shower. In the end we found it much easier to use the small corral that Daniel had made to catch a group and then pick some out of that group. It was much less stressful for everybody and Daniel should be proud of his invention. 

So another packed week has passed and another one is just round the corner. We missed Burns Night on Friday and I am on cook tomorrow so I think we might have a belated Burns Night dinner, complete with haggis. Happy late Burns Night and have a safe week.

Legs Mechanical and Biological

This week has been quieter after the rather stressful Sunday last week when I was convinced I had well and truly gutted one of the jet boat engines. As I wrote in last week’s post Paula, the other Boating Officer, has returned to the island. It says a lot for her that everyone was very eager to see her and welcome her back. However poor Paula seems to have some type of flu which she has been developing since New Year so she has been rather out of action for a couple of days. But when she felt more herself  her presence in the boat shed has been brilliant. She knows where everything is and can lay her finger on most things quickly which means that the time spent by me searching for things will dramatically reduce, which is a massive relief because it was beginning to annoy me.

The other exciting thing that happened this week was that we finally got our boatshed back. The builders, who have been in there since January 1st, finished putting all the windows in on Tuesday and they gave us back our boatshed in immaculate condition, in fact cleaner than it was when they went in there. It was a great feeling to be back in there because it meant that I could get on with a lot of jobs that I had been holding off on because I couldn’t access the  tools very easily and most of the work that I needed to do required the boats to be under cover so that any weather didn’t damage the engines. It also meant we could use the lifting chains to work on the boat trailers with the boats off them.

Luna in the air

The big occasion this week has been the arrival of the Commissioner of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. Nigel Heywood is also the Governor of the Falkland Islands and came down to visit us for a week/ten days on Tuesday. His visit brought about a bit of a tidy up on base and a change of flag. Our normal flag is the South Georgia crest on a blue background with a Union Jack in the corner but the flag for the visit of Royalty (or Royalty’s representative) is a Union Flag with the crest of South Georgia in the middle - quite smart. His visit also coincided with Possession Day which is the anniversary of the day that Captain James Cook took possession of South Georgia for Great Britain and the Empire. I find it rather refreshing that it is not ‘Discovery Day’ or ‘Cook Day’; we are not celebrating the discovery of South Georgia, we are celebrating the day that we took it and declared it ours. I like that it has not been sugar coated and is forthright. Rather like most of the things that happen on the island.

Commissioner's Flag

The work that has been taking up most of my time this week is the rebuild of the troublesome engine which Paula and I started together on Wednesday. I won’t bore you too much with the details but we basically had to strip the entire engine apart into several bits until there was nothing left on the boat but the holding bracket. The most nerve-wracking bit was taking the powerhead off. This is the bit which actually powers the engine and to see that dangling from the engine crane was a slightly dicey moment but it found a safe temporary home on a chair (very unorthodox) and stayed there happily while we stripped everything else apart. We had to cannibalise a couple of bits off a scrap engine but once they were on and we had carefully put the troublesome leg (the bit that is in the water) back together and reassembled that with the rest of the engine, we wheeled Alert out of the boatshed and, with our fingers crossed, started her up. Thank heavens she fired pretty much first time. We still don’t have a telltale (which shows that water is running around the engine cooling it) but I think that will be solved when we put the engine actually in the water. I unfortunately broke the starter cord which pinged the handle back at me with enough force to bruise my collarbone. This means that before we can test it again I have to go down to the boatshed and change it over. I will be ecstatic when the engine is working properly again and we don’t have the worry of it looming over our heads any more.

Paula and the powerhead

The social event of the week for me was on Friday night when Daniel and I were invited over to the ‘Museum’ (the people running the museum who live over in Grytviken in a house called Drukken Villa) for dinner. Considering that the last dinner they hosted over there went on till 0400 we went prepared for a good evening. It was splendid and things didn’t even have a dampener put on them when Sarah (museum manager) called to say that the ship they were expecting the next day would be arriving at 0800 rather than 1300. It was only at 0030 that Thomas (the curatorial intern) and Derren (one of the guys running the museum) realised that there were still tools lying all over the floor and a display not set up properly because they thought they had the morning to do it all. We decided to go over and do it all there and then. Seeing a display being put together by an expert is an experience in itself but when that expert is slightly tipsy and it is 0100 then it is quite a sight to see. Once we had everything in place Thomas let Sam (a volunteer for the museum) and me into the building which houses the replica of the James Caird, the small boat that Shackleton and 5 others sailed in from Elephant Island to South Georgia. I had seen it before from the outside but this time we were allowed to get in her. She is a working replica and was used for an expedition a couple of years ago. Getting in her made me realise for the first time just how small and cramped she was. Seeing her from the outside one realises that she is small but only when I got in did I feel how difficult it was to move around and even to see. I am not very tall but I had to sit hunched over to avoid hitting my head. The only light came from the hatch where the 2 men on watch would stand. The men were constantly wet with their kit so continuously soaked that the reindeer sleeping bags, which had lasted them so well so far, started to decompose. It just brought home how utterly incredible the journey and the men were. It really was an age of heroes. 

After imagining one incredible physical feat we took part in what felt like another one on Sunday! It was the annual South Georgia Half Marathon. There are three categories: The runners (all serious runners who have competed in marathons before or have been training hard), the runklers (runkling is a mixture of running and walking) and walkers. I took part as a walker. The commissioner and the head of the government, Martin Collins, took part as runners and the rest of the field was made up of people on base and some guys from the Pharos. Now 13 miles is quite a long way but when you consider the course, I did find myself wondering, half way through, why I was mad enough to take part. The course starts at the jail at Base. From there we went to Grytviken and around the back of the football pitch (built by the army during their sojourn here). Then we had to go through bog around Gull Lake to a big boulder. Once seen by the marshal there we went straight up the shoulder of Brown Mountain and along the ridge to the highest point of the course and the second marshal at 332m (1090 feet). We then went along the ridge until we met the third marshal who was there to point the way so we wouldn’t attempt to drop off one of the many cliffs that make up most of the flanks of Brown Mountain. Once off Brown we made our way across the Brown Flats (again bog), round the back of the football pitch and back to Base. Once there the false security of being back at base was whisked aside when we remembered we had to go over Deadman’s Pass (100some meters) to Maiviken Hut and then back again. The fastest runner was Martin Collins and he made it in 1hr, 47mins, and 57secs. He was closely followed by Hugh (the Post master) who came in at 1hr, 48mins and 04secs, only 7 seconds behind Martin. As the last of the walkers (I managed to hurt my knee coming off Brown Mountain) I came in at a very respectable 3hrs, 48mins and 24secs. I won’t say that it was enjoyable but I am glad that I did it. I will be feeling the after effect in my legs for a week I should think.

Marathon certificate - yay!

Marathon on Brown Mountain

This week was one in which we managed to get the leg of the engine working and I managed to prove that my legs were strong enough to do a ½ marathon that would nearly kill a lot of people. The final cherry on the cake was as we were all having a well earned cup of tea (only the British would rehydrate after a run with a cup of tea) and lunch this afternoon. Silently the huge iceberg that has been grounded for so long across the bay from the Base collapsed in on itself in the middle. This has lifted the previously submarine bottom sides out of the water and it is incredible to see how far they extend. The waves that were created by this collapse came up the beach about 1.5m, even though we are about 1.5 miles away from the berg. The penguins all had to scuttle up the beach rather more rapidly than they are accustomed to move and watching a couple of Furries ride the wave was impressive. Yet another wonder in this wonderful place.

Weather and Weighing

This week has been full of weather. When you ask anyone who has been down here for more than a month what the weather is doing today the answer you normally get is: “changing”. It can snow on any day of the year here, including midsummer’s day. We do have a number of forecasting and weather tools. We can look at the ‘actuals’ which give current data including current temperature, humidity, 10 min wind speed average and10 min max wind speed. We can look at a site that has weather compiled for us by a forecasting service. It is compiled for all of BAS’ bases but is geared towards the pilots, giving pressure, temperature, precipitation and wind speed data up into the air columns. We look at the sea level data which is of course the only thing that really affects us. There are other websites which we can use, including a Norwegian one (Norway still has strong ties to the island from the whaling and sealing days). However all of these websites depend on the same, limited, data points which get sent in to the modellers only a couple of times a day. This is a huge difference from services like the Met Office which have hundreds if not thousands of data points constantly sending data into the central computer system and if you think about the level of accuracy that the Met Office models are able to get then you can imagine that for us, our best bet is to look out of the window. If we go anywhere beyond Grytviken, our packs always have suncream and waterproofs in them, sunglasses and snowgoggles.

Dawn amongst the bergs (these bergs, out at sea, can be 15km in length)

 

On Tuesday ten of us, from the base and the museum, went to Maiviken for the first of three Fur Seal pup weighing sessions. The reasons we do this are to see how the weights compare to other years and to see how their weights progress over three months. This can give a good indication of what the krill and other fish levels are like. That night we had very unusually had a thunderstorm. I was woken up at around 0200 and then again at 0400 by the thunder. I thought it might have been one of the icebergs calving but that idea was put paid to when I saw the lightning. It was very impressive. The furries don’t seem to like storms but then since they are very rare I don’t suppose they have much opportunity to get used to them. Every time there was a thunderclap they would squeal and the mothers and pups would call to each other frantically.

This weather continued into the morning with sleet and an incredibly strong wind which threatened to dampen our enthusiasm. As we walked around the track to Grytviken you could see the wind lash the surface of the sea into spume and then whirl it around the cove. It was almost as if the living wind were dancing with the airborne water. Very beautiful as well as awe-inspiring. We battled on against this gale until we reached the flanks of Deadman’s Pass. Here we were struck by a gust that must have reached about 90kts (a hurricane starts at 64kts). Those of us who weren’t knocked to the ground by the force of it had to drop to our knees to stop from being blown over. I looked up to see Rod hanging onto the rocks and both Sue and Katie curled up in the foetal position. Once we were let up from this position we continued on and at the top of Deadman’s saw patches of snow that had sprinklings of scree on top which had been blown there by the wind. I am very glad that we weren’t there for that, rocks flying through the air could have been quite painful.

It seemed that once the island had thrown its worst at us and seen that we would not be deterred,  it decided to make life easier for us and by the time we had reached the weighing beach the weather had become beautiful. We had to negotiate our way through tussock thick with Furries and eventually ended up walking down a stream bed to reach the beach. We made a beach head at a large rock, dumped all our gear and put on oilskins. We wear these to protect ourselves, not only from the small but needle sharp teeth of the pups, but also from any puppy bodily fluids released while we were handling them.

There is a very careful protocol followed when weighing pups and everything is done with the greatest care to ensure that neither the pup nor the weigher gets hurt. We separated into two teams, each one led by a couple of people who had weighed pups before. We had to weigh 50 from the beach and 50 from the tussock so each team did 25 from each. To make sure that the sampling was random you had to choose your pup and catch that one and only that one and not be distracted by others that might present an easier target. It is simple enough to say that but when your pup goes to ground behind a large angry male, or underneath an overhanging tussock clump, it is easier said than done. A couple of times my target pup went to ground under a tussock hump and it took a small bit of nerve to put my hand into the hole knowing that there was at least one angry pup in there, possibly more, all with no intention of being caught by the bright orange legged monster looming over them. I was nipped through my glove by one of these tussock hiders and then as I was carrying them to the weighing station I had a couple get lucky shots through the oilys and nip my knees. Most of the time they were just grabbing the oilskins and attempting to shake them into submission.

Pup sitting on my foot

Once they were caught we sexed them by looking under their tails and placed them carefully into the premade canvas bags. They were then weighed and once the weight had been recorded they were sprayed with stock marker (which will come off soon) and sent on their merry ways back where they were first spotted. The beach was fairly easy as long as one worked in pairs, with one dealing with the big males while the other caught a pup. Working in the tussock was more challenging. The pups had more places to hide and you would be chasing one with your head down and suddenly find that it had taken shelter behind an angry female with no qualms about attacking you. We managed the whole thing fairly easily and far quicker than I thought and then had a leisurely lunch on the beach watching the annoyed pups scampering around with orange splodges on their backs. It really was the most idyllic day. The next wildlife weighing adventure will be on the 27^th when we weigh the fledgling Gentoo Chicks.

After a couple of days of idyllic weather it turned foul again. Today we had a steady 22kts of wind with gusts of up to 40kts. It was actually quite an eventful day for a Sunday. A cruise ship, the Delphine, had kindly brought on board seven people who needed to be dropped off with us: Kelvin, an invasive plant species specialist; Anne, Aja and Andy,  three microbial soil scientists; a couple of Norwegians for the reindeer project and Paula, the second boating officer, who is returning to do her 4^th winter here (not consecutively). We had to get them ashore but the wind was too strong for the cruise ship’s zodiacs to deal with so I was asked to go out in the launch.

Heading for the Delphine

[To explain this next bit: a jet driven boat sucks up water with an impellor (a propeller inside the jet unit) and then spits it out behind the boat like the jet engine on a fighter jet (imagine the flame coming out of one of those but as water). You have a throttle to increase the speed with which the water is sucked in and control ‘buckets’ which control whether the water shoots out the back or forward and that can determine whether you go forward or astern. If anything is sucked up into the jets then you lose all power and propulsion]

I was just about to leave the jetty when a huge amount of kelp was sucked into my jets. This meant I had no power and the 40kts gust that chose that moment to arrive blew us onto the wall behind. By dint of hard work and almost the entire base arriving to help (some of them more hungover than others) we got her back to her moorings and then started the process of clearing the jets, checking the engine and making an exit plan. We had to pull up large amounts of kelp but eventually we got the area clear. After pulling up the kelp I raised my hands and found I was covered in slime, making me look as if I had been dealing with an alien. After waiting a little longer for the wind to abate slightly we tried again. This time we were successful and headed off for the Delphine. She gave us a lee from the wind but there was still some nasty swell to contend with and after a fair bit of heart racing from me and some swift stepping over from the pax we got everyone, their luggage and equipment aboard and returned to base for ‘tea and medals’.

Alongside the Delphine

At the helm

 

 I won’t bore you with the details but that was some of the trickiest conditions I have had to deal with so far on a jet boat and when we returned I found I was inexplicably exhausted.

We have now hunkered down in Everson lounge with tea and cake (made to welcome Paula ‘home’) and are trying not to get annoyed with the several power outages we have been having all day due to the hydroelectric plant playing up. Hopefully this wind won’t stay longer than the forecast two or three days because wandering around base with sleet being blown in your face at 40kts is uncomfortable. With the arrival of Paula we nearly have our complete wintering compliment. We are just waiting for Hazel, the doc, and all the players shall have arrived on stage.  

2013 Awakes

The final day of 2012 saw me taking apart the engine that stopped working on Dec 24^th. I had to take the whole lower leg off and change the water pump. I was very proud of myself for having put it back together. Unfortunately, even though I spent half an hour trying to start it, nothing happened except for it backfiring so, since it was 1730 on New Year’s Eve, I left it till next year.

We had a nice, small celebration for New Year’s Eve. Everyone came round to ours as usual and we had a buffet which everyone pitched in to help with. After stuffing ourselves we all played a big game of celebrity salad bowl. It is a great game, although  I haven’t played it in quite this way before. Everyone puts into a bowl 5 names. They could be celebrities, cartoon characters, people you know etc. You then split into two teams; the person holding the bowl has to describe to their team as many of the people as possible in 1 minute without saying their name, so for Churchill: “Prime Minister in WWII” could be way to do it. The bowl goes round with the teams taking it in turns to guess as many as possible till the bowl is empty. In the second round all the names go back in the bowl and you can only describe the person in 3 words so Churchill would be: “Prime Minister War”. The last round you can only mime so again for Churchill you would mime smoking a cigar and giving the V sign. There can be an extra round where you are only allowed a facial expression but that is ridiculously hard and can get very silly. At midnight we had champagne and everyone shuffled round the bar shaking hands or giving each other a hug and wishing each other a happy New Year. John, Joe, Derren, Gemma, Micky the builder and I wandered out to the back deck and shared a couple of cigars, chatting about the future and watching the mist rise up out of the kelp and disappear into the ice. A perfect way to start the New Year.

Big berg off Hope Point

The next day, which should have been a holiday, we all had to work because we had the Pharos come in. In addition I was on earlies but I admit to putting my clothes on over my pyjamas and doing my rounds before heading back to bed for a couple more hours. The Pharos offloaded a large amount of containers for various projects. There were also a bunch of Norwegians here for a Reindeer project. We helped with cargo and bits and bobs and then in the evening the Norgies (as they’re called here) came up to the bar for a couple of beers. Most of us were pretty dead though, so slipped off to bed one by one.

Night Penguin

The 2^nd was also taken up with cargo and helping the Norgies prepare for their project. I managed to inadvertently cause a bit of a bio security scare. I had to move 3 205l drums of petrol to put on the Pharos and the pallet on which they stood was disintegrating so, by accident, I picked up a divot of sod which dropped when I put the pallet down by the ship. I didn’t notice but it was picked up by the GOs and put into the bio security shed to be investigated and checked over for invasive species, in case it had come in on the Pharos. It was only the next day that I heard about it and managed to allay their fears. The Pharos left to put the reindeer project into place at Husvik and we had to say goodbye to Alastair who left to go and work for the project.

The bio-security protocols that we have here are very strict. Every time someone gets on or off a ship they have to step in Virkon which is an everything-cide to make sure there are no plants, animals, bacteria, fungi or even viruses on our shoes when we come ashore. Every time anyone goes to one of the other peninsulas on the island the same thing happens to make sure that any invasives which we have on our peninsula (because of lax bio security in the past) don’t get spread to other areas. One of the big problems at the moment is Bittercress which Keiron is fighting hard to stay on top of. Unfortunately the battle has been lost against Dandelions and they are now a permanent feature on the peninsula. What makes it so difficult to keep plants under control is not only human movement but also the seals and, mainly, ducks, who wander through an area of invasive plants and then spread it into virgin territory. Every time we have fresh food come in it needs to be checked. The food we offloaded during relief we didn’t have to check (thank god) because it was packed in a known bio-secure area back in the UK. However the freshies that the Pharos brought us this time had to be taken into the bio-security hut and meticulously picked over by us for any sign of insects or other invasives. If anything is found it has to be put in a specimen jar and if we can’t identify it, it is sent to scientists in the Falklands or back home for IDing.

The rest of the week was taken up by me attempting to fix the damned engine, this time with Erny’s help. We took it apart again and once we had put it back together it worked. However, we had water coming out of a very odd place which was not right so after some testing we took it all apart again. Unfortunately we have just had to take more and more off so now the only thing still attached to the boat is the powerhead (if any of the jargon that I am spouting confuses you, just imagine how I feel having to take it apart and figure out why it isn’t working! This is stumping our mechanic who has 30 years of experience so you can picture what it is doing to my brain.). Fortunately we have had sunshine for most of this week because my boatshed has been taken over by the builders painting windows so we have been working outside.

When I wasn’t elbow deep in engines we had a very exciting addition to the museum. The son of Reginald James (who was on Shackleton’s Endurance expedition) donated Frank Worsley’s nautical almanac back to the museum. Frank Worsley was the captain of the Endurance and it was only by his incredibly skilful navigation that they made it in their small open boat from Elephant Island to South Georgia. He was only able to take a reading with his sextant twice and both times the boat was pitching so badly that he had to be held up by the others and he wasn’t sure he had managed to see the horizon correctly. Using the very sketchy readings that he had managed to take, and this almanac, he was able to navigate to South Georgia when failure, which would have been all too easy, would have meant a slow, lingering death for all of them in the South Atlantic. An almanac has all the details of tides, sunrise and sunset, star movements and times, etc for each day of the year to allow sailors to navigate. By law every ship still has to carry one and every maritime officer has to be able to navigate using it in case the electronic systems break down. In Worsley’s day it was the only way to navigate. He describes in his book “Shackleton’s Boat Journey” how he had managed to keep the almanac dry up to their setting out in the boat but that after a couple of days the pages started disintegrating and it was a race as to whether they would reach South Georgia or whether the book would disintegrate first. Luckily the James Caird (their small boat) won. The almanac definitely looks as if it has had a hard life and is in very delicate condition. Thomas (the curatorial intern) was extremely twitchy when opening the packet and looked quite funny in a museum fleece and white cotton gloves but he did a grand job and it will be the main feature in the museum from now on.

Frank Worsley's almanac

Other than that, the highlight of my week (my year so far) was Saturday. After a very lazy morning luxuriating in the joy of reading in bed I was eating breakfast when the call came from Daniel over at Maiviken that the second seal they had tagged had come back and he needed help to catch her. Rod and I raced over there. Literally raced, we only stopped once for Rod to retie his boot and Deadman’s Pass was very nearly Deadwoman’s Pass, I must be getting increasingly hill fit though because I wouldn’t have been able to do that a couple of months ago. However, I am feeling the effects today.

This female was far less eager to be caught than the first one and she took us on a chase around Puppy Lake. This was interesting because she took us through a couple of harems, where the males tried to take advantage and catch both her and us as additions to their harems. We eventually caught her and as I was the closest I sat on her to restrain and calm her, which is the normal practice. She was remarkably warm and, as I have mentioned before, her fur so soft that it was difficult to concentrate on cutting the tag off and not running my hands through her fur. We had the tag off and her measured and weighed pretty quickly and we let her go to recover and relax. I am looking forward to seeing the track from her GPS tag.

Maiviken Blondie

Next week, I hope I will find myself in Maiviken again, on Tuesday, as we have the first pup weighing day on which anyone who is free helps. I am really looking forward to it.

Bathing Beauties

So far 2013 has been a real mixture of history, a learning curve as vertical as it can get and the excitement and satisfaction of catching and detagging a seal. If every week of 2013 is half as good as this then it should be a cracking year.