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.
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| 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.
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| 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 27th 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 4th 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.
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| 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’.
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| Alongside the Delphine |
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| 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.
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