Ella Down South: S.B.S. Taxis

After a packed week last week we thought that it might quieten down slightly this week but it seems that we were wrong. We have been ferrying so many people here, there and everywhere that Paula and I have decided to put up a sign above the boatshed door calling our selves the Special Boat Services Taxi Company. While this might sound like we are complaining at the amount of work that we have I am actually very pleased to be having this level of work. I would struggle with less to do.

To start the week off with a bang I had to have my leg x-rayed. I have been having a really quite bad pain in my leg since I banged it on the bottom of a 205l drum of fuel and then did the half marathon. Hazel (the new doc) thought it might be a good idea to check it out. It was pretty cool. We don’t have the digital machines that are the norm in hospitals nowadays and our machine is actually a veterinary one! We got the plates into position and took the x-rays then we went into the dark room to develop them. Watching the white of my bone slowly come through in the dim, red glow of the lamp I was struck once again by how magical our world actually is. We can make a picture out of seemingly nothing and we can talk to our families 9000 miles away on a signal bounced through space. We do live in the most remarkable times. [In case you want to know there was no sign of a break in my leg and Hazel says it is either a badly bruised bone or a stress fracture that can’t be seen on the x-ray. Either way all I can do is rest it - tricky, especially with our busy life on South Georgia.]

After that little incident I continued the week by doing Earlies, showing Hazel the ropes. We had already decided that we would have a late Burns night so we were lucky in that we only had to cook ‘neeps’ (parsnips) and ‘tatties’ (potatoes) as well as put the Haggis in the oven. Trying to explain Burns night to foreigners is slightly tricky but the age old tradition of telling them that haggis are small creatures, who live on the hill with one pair of legs shorter than the other so they can go around the hill more easily, never palls. The confusion on their faces is always a classic.

We have had, since last week, a group of five meteorologists who are setting balloons off every day and sometimes several times a day. They are a great bunch and have been fantastic at volunteering to cook every night. It has been brilliant because as winterers it has meant that we basically just have had to do the rounds and make the bread, then they would do the cooking. It will be boring to go back to having to cook every time we are on earlies.

On Wednesday our fisheries scientists returned from their ground fish survey and so the whole team was together for the first time. They looked pretty shattered from their week or so but they said it was a very good survey and they are beginning to process the data now. I can see that my offer of helping with the analysis of fish stomachs may well be taken up. As well as helping in the lab I was able to help in the surgery on Sunday morning. The owner/skipper of the yacht Katique (which is around for a couple of weeks) asked for Hazel to just check his toe which had been broken a couple of weeks before. I was able to help by translating for his wife (they are French) and got to learn a bit from Hazel which is good. It’s always good to glean as much information from as many sources as possible; you never know when you might need it.

On Wednesday we were collecting the three soil beakers (scientists) from Corral when we were hailed by the Pharos. They needed to input some people into Sorling which is further up the bay, closer to the glacier and they were concerned about ice. Their zodiac (a small rubber dinghy) is having engine problems (so much so that they have to borrow an engine off the military) and they didn’t want to put it into the water too far from the mother ship. We were asked if we would mind taking a couple of people they needed to input in through the ice. Of course we didn’t and we spent the next hour shadowing the Pharos through the ice till she reached the point she was no longer happy to go through and Paula picked them up in the RIB and took them to the beach. This was the thickest brash ice that I have driven in and I was surprised when I got back to base how tired I found I was. I have described it before but the ‘singing’ of the ice is a phenomenon that I would gladly listen to every day. To think that those gasses that are being released were last in the atmosphere thousands of years ago does make one feel rather small.

Another moment this week which made me feel small was taking the soil beakers to the Greene peninsula. We dropped their kit off at the hut and then took them up Moraine Fjord to the Harker Glacier. As we came closer and closer to the glacier the mountains grew in magnitude till they rose sheer above us, forbidding and grim. The glacier itself is very active with a lot of sediment in it. It moves quite a lot so we were in a basin at its foo,t surrounded by towering cliffs running with silver streams racing to the sea, and we would hear a crack from deep inside the ice which would reverberate around the flanks of the hills. With the snow at the tops of the mountains and the scree, razor sharp and unstable, it made me think of nothing more than Tolkien’s descriptions of Mordor or the Misty Mountains peopled by goblins and Urukhai waiting for their next unsuspecting victim.

To highlight the Wagnerian feel of the day, that evening I was returning from the Cook labs to Everson house when I looked behind me at the sky. The clouds above Hodges and Echo Pass were a conflagration of liquid fire. The movement of the clouds roiled the reds, oranges and golds till the sea beneath looked to be ablaze, an image cemented by the orange fronds of kelp waving in the wind. It was quite incredible and after collecting my camera (which has caught nothing of the feel or true grandeur of the spectacle) I stood watching it for half an hour in the briskening wind until the sun set and the fire was extinguished. It is no wonder that people who lived in these types of environments in the ancient days believed in gods and monsters. I was a little inclined myself to believe that Thor was returning.

What a fabulous place to live in. I really do think I am one of the luckiest people I know.