Indents and Ice

This is going to be one of the shorter blogs I have put up due to the fact that the entire week has been taken up by Indenting. This is a form of torture that is illegal under the Geneva Convention but has to be done to allow for accurate ordering next year. Basically every department has to go through its stores and note down what they have and in what quantities. It seems to be that pretty much every department has been doing their indent this month except for Hazel who has until a little later to do hers. Paula, being the star that she is, has been working in the boat store for a couple of weeks tidying, counting and generally making our indent week much easier while I worked on the boats. 

We use a computer system called AMOS which tells us when to do maintenance and what spares we have in stock. The day of truth arrived on Monday and when we printed out the list we found that it was 35 pages of size 8 font, and very small line spacing! I will not describe to you what it was like other than the fact that I can tell you (and in fact feel impelled to tell you) that we have: 143 M6 flat washers; 488 M8 full nuts; 24 fuel filters and a partridge in a pear tree. We had to check every item against its AMOS number and then count the number that we had and make sure that it tallied up with how much AMOS thinks we should have. It should be fairly simple since whenever we use anything in maintenance we take it out of stock on AMOS so technically it should already be right but we found ourselves elbow deep in rope that hasn’t been used in years trying to estimate how many meters we had of 16ml, 3 braid nylon rope and how many of 16ml, 3 braid polypropene rope we have (and no I can’t tell the difference, nor can Paula).  We eventually finished it late Thursday afternoon and I then spent the entirety of Friday morning in putting it into the computer. I cannot tell you how pleased we are that it is done. 

On Friday afternoon we helped out with the kitchen indent and on Monday I will help Rod with the communication equipment indent and Hazel with the medical indent, both of which, I am sure, will be just as much fun as our own. 

The weather that was threatened reduced in magnitude but it was still very breezy and snowy. There was even pancake ice on the cove. Since it never actually got down to much below -5 all week this shows just how much freshwater runoff we have into the cove. The salt water is denser than the fresh and so sinks. The fresher water is therefore on the surface and can freeze in ‘warmer’ conditions than open sea water which is fully saline and therefore needs much colder conditions.

Pancake ice on the cove

 The three Rat project helicopters returned to Grytviken to seek shelter which meant that we had the company of a few extra people on base, alleviating somewhat our loss of the builders (not by much though, we all are still finding it odd that they are not here).

While winter did start its march on the base, the weather  improved towards the end of the week so Hazel, Daniel and I decided to go off on Friday evening and spend the night in the Sealers Cave in Maiviken. [I apologise now that I forgot my camera and therefore have no photos of this expedition]. This is a cave whose entrance was boarded up a good may years ago, probably by seal hunters, with a door to provide access. It is quite large and deep, with a platform next to the entrance which ensures everything is dry and gives a nice place for sleeping. 

Hazel carried my sleeping kit as well as her own and I carried ½ a rucksack full of wood. We left slightly later than planned but still made it to Maiviken hut just as it was getting dark. There we picked up thermorests for sleeping on and water (the stream near the cave is rather seally) and made our way through the darkening evening to the cave. It is a little higher than the beach so we had to negotiate our way through a bit of tussock, a slightly trickier prospect in the dark than during the day!

Once at the cave Daniel and I lit the fire while Hazel got on with the far more important job of cooking dinner. It was the most lovely evening, the sky was clear but it wasn’t very cold at all and from the cave mouth, through the flames, we could see stars and could tell that the moon was very bright by its light on the hill opposite across the bay. Wandering down to the beach we could see the moon itself and looking back towards the cave we could see the firelight flickering on the cave walls but couldn’t see the fire itself. Moments like these remind me of  the part in Jack London’s ‘Call of the Wild’ where Buck, the main character, a dog who slowly reverts to being a wolf,  looks into a fire and sees it with the eyes of a thousand generations of his ancestors to whom it calls through the ages. It really was a perfect evening and quite nice to have a night off base. 

The next morning Daniel had to head off early since he was on cook on Saturday (someone did his earlies for him) and he left Hazel and me to dawdle back. It was snowing so we changed our plan of exploring Boulder Pass to having a cup of tea in Maiviken Hut and then exploring around the lake near there. It wasn’t snowing too hard and when we turned at the top of Deadman’s Pass we could see the sun shining on West Cumberland Bay. 

This morning (Sunday) I was on earlies and had to do my prestart checks on the boat at the same time. Just as I was finishing the snow started to fall with intent and I was soon slightly damp. I took the Government Officers and Sue out to Antarctic Bay, the last Toothfish longliner to be inspected this season, through snow that was diffusing the low sunlight to cloak the hills in glory. It was wonderful. 

Hopefully next week will see some more of our lot going off on holiday, we all deserve a break and it will also soon see the end of indenting season. I hope never to have to do that again!

Fog

As the fog which I had been watching creep malevolently and yet impersonally across the face of the sea finally wrapped us in its clammy grip, I took a last sighting off Cape George, a last glance at the shifting orb that was once the sun and then turned to the radar, depth sounder and chart. The chartplotter was offset to another bay which meant that according to its stupid computerised mind we were currently on land, on Cape George (which we most certainly were not), and I was not convinced enough of our position to reset it. This meant that we were relying on radar, the depth sounder and two charts; one, covering only a small area and therefore not as detailed in the right places as it could be and the other, more detailed one, surveyed in the 1970’s with its depths recorded in fathoms. Off the top of your head: What is the conversion from metres (which the depth sounder measures in) to fathoms? No? Nope me neither. As someone said later, we could see the tops of the mountains which was reassuring, however it was the bottoms of those vertical walls which rise so majestically from the water that I was worried about, so my eyes were definitely not soaring to those peaks. To turn starboard, out to sea, was the only option, with the dragons teeth gauntlet of rocks on our port side, but stay out too far to sea and Tristan da Cunha was the next stop. 

To explain how Sue and I found ourselves navigating on an unknown shore (not only for ourselves but for the Rib behind us, with Hazel and Erny in it, as well) I’ll backtrack a couple of days. 

This week seems to have been bounded by fog; almost every day I woke up and looked out of my window I would see the creeping tendrils on the surface of the sea, effectively erasing the mountains with their weight. Paula and I watched this and anxiously kept an eye on the weather forecasts because this week we were going to St Andrews come hell or high water. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we tried to go to St Andrews but were foiled first by the weather and then by fishing vessels’ timetables slipping. We were going to do it this week and therefore I spent the entirety of Monday with Erny (the mechanic) fixing Luna’s engine. After the whole day wrestling with this inanimate brute of a machine we finally got it working which meant on Tuesday Paula could concentrate on packing for her holiday and I could concentrate on doing several runs to and from fishing vessels all day. 

We had two in so there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing but it was fun. A break from endless maintenance at least. We have been told that KEP is a haven of weather before but I didn’t believe it till I went out to one of the fishing vessels for the third time and saw her caught in a bank of fog while we were in the clear sunshine. As I approached her, the air became softer and every edge became vague. It was a little spooky going into the bank of fog and I was reminded in no small way of the passage in C.S. Lewis’ “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” when they enter a bank of fog and find themselves in a place where nightmares come true, desperately trying to row back out but getting themselves more and more lost. I just hoped that if I got lost an albatross would come, as in the book, and guide us out. 

Fog-bound fishing vessel

 Once we had got all the humdrum work done for the week we set out on Wednesday with full tanks and singing hearts. For the first time since I arrived here over 5 months ago, we got to Right Whale Rocks (which mark the edge of Cumberland Bay) and turned south. This was truly new coast for me. I have been up to Stromness (the other extended boating area to the north of the Bays) twice and when we arrived we came from the north, but south was a completely new concept to me, I had never gone this way even on a ship and now I was navigating to St Andrews Bay. I have described St Andrews Bay in previous blogs but it is the biggest King Penguin colony in the world, with 150,000 pairs, plus chicks!

A lot of penguins

 We had a very oily, uncomfortable swell to deal with on the way down, with rollers that had last seen land on South America so the trip wasn’t as pleasant as it could have been but it was still a wonderful experience to sail on with the bays passing us as we descended the coast. I noticed on the depth sounder that the water along the coast was much shallower than in Cumberland Bay. This must be because Cumberland Bay was scoured out when it was a glacier, leaving it with a bottom at 80-100m below sea level whereas most of the coast had been glacier free, meaning that the bottom was at 50-80m. 

We were 2 miles off the beach when we started being able to smell the colony, a sharp, guano smell that filled the air and made us wrinkle our noses. Soon the air was also thick with the cacophony of 150,000 pairs of penguins each calling to their partner, chick or neighbour at the top of their voice. Up to now the coast had been composed of steep cliffs and coves of varying precipitous drops, but as we rounded the corner a new vista greeted us. There are two glaciers that descend into the bay: The Cook and the Heaney glaciers. These, over the millennia, have scraped the mountains away from this bay and created a long, low, shallow beach of black sand that runs for about 2 nautical miles.As we got closer the heaving white mass focused itself into penguins everywhere you looked and as you looked harder, amongst the black and white mannequins were fuzzy brown shapes that turned out to be the chicks. It was really an incredible sight. 

Even more penguins

  We got all the kit we needed for the hut (first aid kit, emergency food, luxury items such as a tin of hot dogs for when people walked over here, repairs materials etc) on shore and then Jo, Paula, Hazel and Sue carted it all up to the hut and sorted it all out. While they were doing that I had to give poor old Erny some Stugeron since he was feeling quite queasy from the swell and we stayed on the jet boat, holding position till we were next needed. Going in to collect Hazel, Sue and the clatch (a BAS word meaning stuff) that we had removed from the hut, through bad management and bad luck, I managed to get the RIB very stuck on a shelf on the beach which necessitated about 10 minutes of hard pushing, pulling and swearing from the three of us until we finally got off. I will have to remove a fair amount of gravel from the water pipes of those engines I think. 

We left Paula and Jo at St Andrews for their holiday and proceeded to make our way back up the coast. We stopped in at all the boltholes along the route to check them out and to get them in our minds if ever we needed them. [My mother did ask nervously why we would need bolt holes to which I replied: “They are places in which we can shelter if we are out here with engine trouble or the weather picks up”. What I omitted to tell her was that they are also places where a group can camp if one of the boats should be lost to fire, flood or running into a rock, there are some things a mother doesn’t need to hear!] One of the bolt holes is Ocean Harbour so I was able to visit my old friend the ‘Bayard’ (a wreck) from another angle which was nice.

Inspecting the Bayard

 It was while investigating Godthul that the fog came in and we decided to make a quick exit and get home ASAP, which is where you found me at the beginning of this blog entry, nervously navigating my way through a pea souper reminding myself that navigating here was actually easier than navigating the River Thames in fog because there are no rowers or other boats with no radar signal to run into. 

As you may have guessed, from the fact that I am writing this blog, all’s well that ends well and as we passed West Skerry (a small island off Rookery) the fog lifted and we had a good run home. The rest of the week passed quite quietly with really not much happening. The only event of any significance has been the departure of the builders and Pat and Sarah. They left early on Saturday morning and we all came down to the jetty to say as jolly a farewell as we could muster. Some tears were shed and many promises of goodies to be sent our way on the next ship were given and as they pulled away from the dock we gave them a Mexican wave and then set off some flares to give them as good a send off as we could. We will all miss them and now (other than the SGHT (Rat) team which will be leaving soon) it is just us winterers left on base. 

The builders going didn’t really register because soon after they left Hazel, Rod, Daniel and I set off for what we cheerily named ‘A lake tour’. We went up to Gull Lake then Upper Gull Lake and then past Junction Valley which has a gorge in it which is just crying out for a session of gorge walking. We then walked up the edge of Hesttesletten and up to the Hamburg Lakes which were truly lovely, all the way up to Upper Hamburg lake which was milky from the silt released into it by the hanging Hamburg Glacier.

The Hamburg lake and glacier

Infinity ...

 It was a wonderful day but the tramp home across the Hesttesletten was a very long one. It looks much shorter than it really is but this is the longest flat bit on the whole island and one forgets how boring walking on flat can be. We came home to Sue’s wonderful French night where we had cheese soufflé, duck a l’orange and a lemony, spongy pudding. We also wore fancy dress from the neck up. It was a lovely night and all that was missing was Paula and Jo. 

On Sunday afternoon we picked them up from Sorling, after they walked the 7 hours from St Andrews. Unfortunately it was a day earlier than planned because the weather is meant to deteriorate rapidly tonight with 40kt winds and a blizzard, probably, until Thursday. Winter really is on its way. Let’s hope the next blog I send has photos of snow.

The Guinea Pig

This week has been one of mixed weather and not much action. For the first three days we awoke to a thick blanket of freezing fog. You couldn’t see Carse House from Everson house. It was quite dramatic seeing the bones of our world (which I have grown to recognise almost as well as those of home, after seeing and studying them every day for 5 months) covered by a veil of fog which was slowly drawing back to reveal more and more of the landscape. At some points it was almost like those incredible statues (I think by Leonardo)  of veiled women, where he has managed to capture not only the features of the woman but also the way the veil falls over her face,  in stone! Usually in the afternoon the fog would have burned off and one could only see guncrack wisps in the valleys. Since Wednesday afternoon till last night it has been unbelievably beautiful. Bright sunshine, painfully blue skies and a thick frost on the ground in the morning. Howeve,r as you walk along the track to Grytviken there is a stern reminder that when we have no direct sunlight on the base it will be much colder. No matter how many of the buildings were steaming on base there were sections of the track which were still locked in ice as a harbinger of cold. 

A looming Mount Duse

 While the weather was doing odd and wonderful things life on base continued as ever. This week however I did begin to feel slightly like a guinea pig. Hazel had to check someone’s eye for a foreign body in it last weekend and afterward asked me if I would be willing to come and sit while she reminded herself how to use a slitlamp. This is the optometrist’s tool where you put your head in a cradle and the doctor can shine a light of varying strength and/or colour,  to be able to look steadily into an eye to check for problems. We spent half an hour with coffee, fiddling with knobs and levers trying to figure what did what,  but by the end she had got the hang of it. We then swapped places so I could have a look at her iris. If you can, get a willing volunteer, the strongest magnifying glass you can find and a torch. Make sure you don’t blind your volunteer but look at their iris. It is one of the most amazing, beautiful structures I have ever seen. It is incredible. The only thing I can liken it to is a galaxy, or perhaps a solar storm. It is so extraordinary-looking one could just fall into it forever. 

A couple of days later Hazel asked me if she could check whether I would make a good teaching tool for Doc School. She just wanted to check that there was someone who would tolerate having their eyelid everted (turned inside out) so that she could demonstrate it to everyone. It is not the most pleasant sensation in the world but not too bad and in the end we were all able to do it on each other  so we could check if there is something in someone’s eye if Hazel is not here. The reason for Doc School is twofold: 1) to learn for our own benefit and 2) to be able to do simple things so as to be able to either help Hazel if there is an accident or to do simple things like get something out of someone’s eye if she is away from base. I just enjoy learning all of this stuff. 

On Tuesday we had a tabletop Search And Rescue (SAR) exercise, then had a play with the comms and then the stretcher and methods for getting a casualty off a hill. We have something called a cascade stretcher which can have a wheel fitted to the bottom so we can roll people off a hill. We then had a look at how we would get them into the jetboat. If the accident happened on the other side of our peninsula, or on another peninsula, the only way they would get back would be on the boats, so we have to make sure we can easily put the stretcher into and out of the boats without too much hassle. [As a current affairs aside: our peninsula is called Thatcher Peninsula after Margaret. I thought, considering the recent news of her death,  that I would just mention it] After lunch Paula, Hazel and I played a little more with the stretcher and we made some modifications to the system which we think will simplify things and make them better. After that it was such a beautiful day that we took the afternoon off and Hazel and I walked to Penguin River. We chased the sun and sat on a bluff overlooking Hestesletten and over to the Hamburg lakes. It looks remarkably like the African savannah (as long as you don’t look at the icebergs) or the lost world. 

Hestesletten

The Lost World

 In addition to all the science we do on base we are also acting as guinea pigs for a groundbreaking piece of research. The doctors with BAS often do some research on the winterers since we are a captive audience. This year in conference (all members of BAS who go South meet in Cambridge for a week of talks, First Aid courses and field courses) they took blood and did other things as part of their research (we filled out a lot of questionnaires!). As part of the human genome project they are now also looking at mapping the human microbiome. This is made up of all the organisms that live on or inside the human body. Vast, vast numbers of organisms live on or in us and in fact they make up a huge amount of the weight of your body. Some of these organisms are harmful but the majority either have no effect or are beneficial to us. For example bacteria in our stomach help us to digest our food properly. It is thought that by transplanting these organisms several major illnesses can be helped such as Crohn’s disease. We have no idea how they really affect us, this is a completely new science but one that could have extremely wide ranging uses. Hazel (who will start her gastroenterology training when she returns to the NHS) has teamed up with a research group in the UK who are interested in discovering if the stomach organisms homogenise (become the same) in a group that all eat the same food. This is very difficult to study in the UK but on a BAS base where everyone eats the same food everyday for a year.... So (if squeamish move onto the next paragraph) all we have to do is provide her with a stool sample and a questionnaire a couple of times through the winter. We provided a control sample at conference. The results won’t be known for a year or so (the samples won’t be sent home till next year) but should be fascinating. 

After a quiet week we of course had an extremely busy Friday. I was on earlies and saw a wonderful dawn. 

Dawn

 I then did the prestart checks on the jetboats in the dark while trying to time the rising times of the bread I was baking. By 0800 Hazel and I had a RIB in the water and were ready to act as linesboat to the JCR. We duly did that (it can be rather tricky driving through kelp dragging a heavy warp so that if the kelp stops you, the boat actually goes backwards.)  By 0845, while I was still dealing with lines, Paula had taken GO Jo to the Polarstern (a German research vessel that had just collected a group which had been doing lake coring in Jason Lagoon) for a landing briefing and then at 0915 when Keiron had finished the briefing for JCR he and Sue went out with Paula to collect Jo and then they went to the fishing vessel Tronio for an inspection. With three ships in and around the cove it really was like working in a harbour. Very noisy and distracting. I spent all of Friday afternoon learning from Erny (the mechanic) how to replace a wheel bearing (onto the trailer that had lost one). Paula and I then swapped the RIBs around so we now have two RIBs on their own trailers and no RIB on the floor of the boatshed which is a massive bonus. At the same time as all of this a rat team helicopter came in for some maintenance. It was all a bit manic. We had a BBQ for 70 people (51 from the JCR and the rest of us) and it was a delicious BBQ as well. Paula, Joe and Mickey (one of the builders) were stars and gave me a hand otherwise I would have been swamped with the cooking and it was great fun. We provided some reindeer and the JCR kindly provided everything else. On board the JCR was John who was Doc here before Hazel. It was great to see him but he looks very ready to go home. 

The JCR left again on Saturday morning leaving us to the peace and solitude of our base again. Saturday was the last Saturday night for the builders and Pat and Sarah. Their departure this week will leave only 10 of us on base for winter. What with that thought in our heads and the cold nights that we have been having, the idea of winter is creeping up on us rather faster than it had been for the past few weeks. Soon there will be snow and the track will be closed. The cold will creep in and the nights will be longer than the days (it only gets light about 0700 at the moment and gets dark around 1830), we will hunker down and start feeding up for midwinter. I for one have mixed feelings about this but am mostly looking forward to it. 

“Winter is coming”

Abstract art

 

I believe I can fly!

Weather!

When you ask someone here about what the weather is doing today the only answer possible is: “changing”. The weather can change from hour to hour and not just gradually, it can change from blowing a hooly and stinging rain to glorious sunshine in the space of about 5 minutes, it is incredible. We have had our fair share of weather this week I can tell you.

Early Monday morning Paula took Daniel, Sue and Keiron out to the Pharos to be taken to Prion Island for the annual survey of Wandering Albatross nests. Prion Island is up in the Bay of Isles and is one of the few places where Wandering Albatross nest. I was incredibly jealous of them. I managed to see Wanderers from the Pharos when we came down from the Falklands but to be able to see them and their chicks close up, that would be special. The three of them were away for 24 hours and returned on Tuesday. Apparently they did the survey as quickly as possible and then just spent their last hour on the island watching and photographing.

Back on base, our Monday (theoretically a bank holiday) started with Paula and me working to get Luna up and running after being on tyres for a couple of weeks. We had to swap her onto the trailer which involved finding more tyres, lifting Alert off the trailer (with the 2 tonne winch in the boatshed), moving and settling her onto the new tyres, lifting Luna and then moving her onto the trailer. All of that sounds easy but when it is just the two of you and you need to drive the trailer out from under the boat, lift her and hold her square and steady all at once, it can be a little tricky. We managed it and then started the real work of trying to get the throttle right, trying to loosen the steering (which had seized) and trying to get the other (supposedly working) engine started. To cut a long story short,  we arrived at the boatshed expecting an easy morning of work fixing one thing and found ourselves working till late fixing three things so that we were ready to head off on an extended boating trip to St Andrews Bay to the south on Tuesday.

St Andrews Bay holds the biggest King Penguin colony in the world. When you see a photo of thousands of Kings on rocky shores, that is St Andrews. It is an iconic place and we all want to get there eventually. It is part of our extended boating limits because there is a possibility that one day (hopefully never) we might have to do a SAR (Search And Rescue operation) there so we need to do at least one trip to it a year, preferably once every 6 months. In addition to going there for local knowledge gathering (for me, Paula has been there before), we were going to drop GO Jo and Paula there for their holiday. Normally to get there one is dropped off at Sorling, spend the night there and then start early next morning on the 7 hour walk across the Barff peninsula to get there. By dropping them off they would only have to walk one way and we would be able to drop both emergency supplies and small amounts of luxuries (tins of tomatoes etc) for people going there the normal route. This is why we were working like hell to get ready to go on Tuesday. At 1800 we discovered that Luna’s engine, that we had finally fixed the linkages on, was revving too high in neutral so instead of working through the night we just swapped the boats over again. This time it was much easier because there were about 5 of us to do it.

The one light relief we had all day was watching the Tall Ship Barque Europa come into the bay. It was a glorious sight and both Paula and I, covered in oil and cursing the engines, looked at each other asking ourselves what we were doing tinkering with engines when both of our hearts lay with sail. It was lovely to have a ship anchored in the cove and to not have the constant noise of the engines rumble over the peace of the bay.

We were kindly invited aboard for a BBQ. It was quite an odd sight to see flames on a wooden ship from the shore but the food was incredible. Absolutely delicious and the only reason I didn’t have a fifth helping was because my plate was taken away while I wasn’t looking. They are on a 7 week cruise from Punta Arenas, down to the Antarctic Peninsula, back up to South Georgia, out to Tristan da Cunha and then ending in Cape Town. Her fuel tanks don’t have the capacity to get them to Cape Town so they are forced to sail, which I think is exactly right; on a Tall Ship one should only use the engines when absolutely necessary, otherwise what is the point of being on such a vessel?

The Barque Europa

The next day, when we were hoping to go to St Andrews,  the wind had picked up to 40kts and we weren’t going anywhere. It was a bit of a disappointment for everyone, especially Jo and Paula, but we have kept all the necessary kit together and we hope to go next week. One of the rat project helicopters came into the boatshed on Tuesday for its 100 hour service which meant that I was able to catch up with some paperwork in the office without feeling guilty about not doing maintenance. It was quite nice actually.

Getting the helo into the boat shed

The only thing I did do was finish Alert’s elephant trunks (part of an engine). When I had finished Paula complimented me on them saying that they looked like the work of a nine year old. I took it as a compliment because I thought they looked like the work of a blind frog attempting arts and crafts. Hopefully they won’t leak. We just need to test them now.

Elephant trunk

On Wednesday I was woken by my windows rattling. When I looked out, instead of land, all I could see was white spume flighting across the top of the broken angry sea which was being whipped into a tortuous frenzy by the hurricane force winds. Our anemometers read 64kts (a hurricane) but we had a ship nearby whose anemometers only read up to 74kts but the needle was straining to go higher. It was quite incredible. The wind was coming from behind Hodges (the prevailing direction) which normally means we don’t get many waves because the fetch is too short to allow them to build. However on Wednesday waves of between 0.5m to 1m were being created in the space of less than half a mile. It was an incredible display of Aeolian power. I was very glad not to be out at sea when we were sitting at breakfast and suddenly the building shook from a particularly forceful gust. We all stayed inside for most of the day, venturing out only when we had to and trying to think heavy thoughts when we did, to anchor us to the ground. While working in the boatshed we cowered and looked at the ceiling every time a particularly forceful gust prised its fingers into the cracks and tested the fastenings with a heave.

That would be a hurricane

Clouds 1

For the rest of the week we have been having pretty strong winds, nothing quite that bad but pretty impressive all the same. Even when it was calmer at ground level the minute one lifted one’s eyes to the heavens, the turmoil became apparent. The cloud formations were extraordinary and changing so rapidly that you could almost see the wind flexing its muscles. Even when the wind’s strength reduced the cloud shapes created were incredible and so beautiful.

Clouds 2

There is sometimes a certain unfortunate tendency to get slightly complacent here. Maybe not with the wildlife but sometimes we think that we have conquered nature. We use the lake for power, we ride the waves in our powerful boats, cutting through waves that centuries ago would have caused problems; we can deal with anything that could happen. Then a day like Wednesday comes around and when you sit and watch and think about what is actually happening I, for one, begin to feel very small again and glad that I am safe on land when nature decides to give a lesson in humility.