Fog, Snow and Holidays

“Right a bit, good line” Crunch, crunch, crunch, “Left a bit now, good line”. There is a joke that runs around base that whenever Hazel and I go on holiday the weather will inevitably crap out. We have always laughed it off but now we have had to come to the unfortunate realisation that it is true.

I was not able to write my blog last week due to rather a frantic weekend. We discovered in Midwinter week that the oil leak that we had hoped had stopped in Pipit has not. Erny, Paula and I took all of the week before last to investigate and try and figure out what was going on. Actually that should be changed to: Erny spent all week investigating and Paula and I tried to help/not get in the way. In the end it turned out that Paula could help while I mainly just got in the way so I did what I could and then continued to do all the other routine jobs while they worked on the engine (you can’t physically get three people in the engine bay so I really would just have been in the way). Erny had figured out that we needed to change the head cylinder gasket which is a big job and much better done inside. We had the last of the tide on Saturday with which to get her out and it was touch and go with only one engine but in the end we did it and Pipit has been in the boat shed all week. She also needs a new coat of nonslip paint, the current one is no longer non slip. So while Erny read up on the engine Hazel and I spent most of Saturday and Sunday chipping and grinding off what paint we could. This caused clouds of red dust to settle everywhere. It was quite remarkable where it got to. At the same time we had to pack for our holiday to St Andrew’s Bay. Once Paula has left (next month, far too soon) I won’t be able to get as far as St Andrew’s and since I was literally in the way she and Hazel both said it was time to go. When we decided to go it was forecast bright sunshine and beautiful weather and Jo, Hazel and I had just been for a glorious day out to Maiviken. We should have known that the instant we decided to go the weather would turn bad.

After an early start on Monday and many problems with RIB engines not wanting to start (a perennial problem and one that I am trying to fix) we finally made it to Sorling Beach with heavy packs and light hearts. We started walking in sunshine with crisp snow under our snowshoes but by the time we had reached the lake a quarter of the way into our journey the fog had descended and we had to work by GPS and compass.

The dreaded fog

Now I have described our maps before but I will take the time to do it again. In the UK, where the maps are excellent and there are features on them like rivulets and large rocks, navigating in fog can be boring but is very possible. In South Georgia the contours are at 50m. This means that a cliff 49.9m high can be in your way and you would never know. The maps are also very feature poor. There can be one large river on the map but when you look up from the map there are actually three running past your feet and there is no way of knowing which one is the one on the map. Normally, in the UK both Hazel and I would have navigated happily by map and compass but here we simply couldn’t. We descended into Hound Bay which was out of the fog and had a chilly lunch there contemplating the next three hours of travel uphill. We continued on until we literally could not see 5m ahead of our footsteps. At the foot of Mount Skittle we cached our tent so we wouldn’t have to haul it back up the hill when we returned.

So now we are back at the beginning of this blog, with me holding the GPS very firmly in one hand and guiding Hazel back onto the track, while stumbling in the bad visibility behind her. Through teamwork we finally got to the hut and I think I have rarely been  so pleased to see a small damp hut as I was to see that one. We had a meal of ‘rat packs’ (dehydrated ration packs) and large mugfuls of hot tea and cheerfully got into our warm and cosy bunks for the night. The bunks at St Andrews are HUGE. They are bigger than our Pitroom bunks back at the base, and rather comfortable.

The next day saw us rising not very early and tidying up the hut from the night before when we had arrived and literally just dumped everything in our hurry to eat and sleep. We tried to patch the waders that were in the hut so we could cross the rivers to get to the colony. It was still foggy and fairly chilly but even if the fog hadn’t lifted enough for us to see the yellow snow patches under the penguins,  half a million penguins do make a fair amount of noise and smell so we literally just followed our noses until we arrived in the middle of thousands upon thousands of the little fellows. The adults were sleek and beautiful, looking at us in a rather haughty manner as if to say “More paparazzi? Well if you must, but please get my good side this time. ” The chicks were just huge balls of fuzzy brown. They were looking a little damp round the edges because of the fog and had their tiny heads tucked right down onto their huge bodies to keep warm but they were the most enchanting things ever. I had to work very hard to stop Hazel from kidnapping one and bringing it home. I think only the thought that it would make her pack heavier stopped her.



A portion of 500,000 penguins



Hazel restraining herself from kidnapping him



It's so fluffy!

I am not sure that there is any way I can actually describe what 500, 000 King penguins looks, smells and sounds like. The adults give off this harsh klaxoning call while the chicks whistle. There was just so much going on all around us that you didn’t know where to look. Everywhere were adults feeding young ones. The chicks would come up to their adults and whistle enticingly while tapping gently at their bills or necks. The adults would then stretch their necks up as high as possible and proceed to retch noisily until they had regurgitated a sufficient amount of fish and then would bend over the chick, open their bill and the chick would feed from it. It was incredible to see behaviour that most people will only ever see on TV happen right there in front of us. When not watching that we could see other adults herding the young ones away from where they obviously weren’t meant to be going, by tapping them gently with their flippers. Others were quarrelling noisily and yet more were just moving around in one glorious mass of penguin existence.

Kings of the castle

Poser

Preparing for dinner



Reflections



Hazel's hand vs. Giant Petrel's footprints

We read the hut visitors book that evening to see who had been here and in it there was a couple of entries from a BBC camera crew who had been there to film for ‘Frozen Planet’. In the older hut books there were also entries from some of the military chaps who had been there on patrol, including a couple of entries from the Gurkha regiment. I am not sure why but it seemed very odd to see Nepalese written in a book on a bleak beach in the middle of South Georgia.

The next day dawned, yep you guessed it: foggy and damp. We redonned our wet socks (dried in the lid of the pasta pan the evening before) and the sodden waders (no, the patching hadn’t worked very well) and made our way back to the colony. This time we copied the locals who I had noticed crossing the river by a much shallower route during my morning ablutions. We went further than the day before, right to the other end of the beach and had our lunch watching the migration of Kings from one end of the beach to the other. They all seemed to be wanting to go to the North end of the beach and we couldn’t figure out why on earth. It was very amusing to sit and ‘people’ watch during our lunch, the variety of sizes and shapes was extraordinary and there were quite a number of fat ones who were having great trouble waddling along. It was wonderful. The best bit was watching them cross rivers. It was as if they didn’t want to get their ‘hands’ wet. They would lift their flippers high above the water and wade through the current. Sometimes it would get to be too strong or too deep for them and they would dip their heads and swim the rest of the way but if they could they would stay wading. Such silly birds.

After hearing the forecast for the last few days of our sojourn we decided to leave on Thursday afternoon, find our tent and then camp at Hound Bay (which is about half way). There was snow forecast and the first part of the route above the hut is steep enough that it could have caused us problems if the snow got any deeper. We started out in the afternoon with packs that were lighter than when we had arrived (through having eaten food and used fuel) but still heavier than we could wish. My knee was still playing up so Hazel, saint that she is, broke trail the entire way, while carrying the heavier pack (I could not persuade her to give me more, no matter how hard I tried). I am not sure how she did it since the snow conditions were miserable and for the first hour or so every two steps we took we would slide one back. I navigated us back to our tent and after that, even though our packs were slightly heavier, we walked with a lighter step knowing that we wouldn’t have a cold night in bivvy bags and that the hardest bit was behind us.

We camped as low as we could above Hound Bay, ensuring that we could clear enough snow so as not to be lying on the stuff but yet had enough to use for water. We thought it would be a cold night but actually in the end it wasn’t too bad at all, much warmer than both of us thought it might be. It snowed constantly through the night, not too heavily, but enough for us to be sure that we had made the right decision to leave on Thursday. After a breakfast of ‘Hot Cereal Start’ (a rat pack that has 702 calories, perfect for starting a hard day’s work) and slightly kero tasting tea, we broke camp and headed back to Sorling Beach for our pickup. As we arrived at the beach we saw the first sun that we had seen all holiday, it was still covered in fog but it was there. Annoying.



After a night at Hound Bay



The only sun we saw all holiday

We arrived back to find Pipit’s starboard engine still in multiple pieces over the boatshed but progress has been made and it seems to be going well. I will spend the next week helping where I can, trying to stay out of the way and doing the other routine maintenance, till the weekend, when hopefully they will have finished and I can get going on the chipping off of the old paint and painting on of the new stuff. I just hope I can get it done in time to catch the next tide. It looks like next weekend could be a little rushed but then that is how boating works.

This week wasn’t the most fantastic in terms of weather and navigation but we had a very enjoyable time with the penguins and that colony is something I will NEVER forget.