Return of the Ellies

The weather gods continued to mock us with perfect weather on Tuesday. In the end it was too much and at lunch time on Tuesday Hazel and I downed tools, packed and headed out to camp at Penguin River. It was the most perfect weather, not a cloud in the sky, bright blue heavens and good firm snow underfoot. Penguin River is just across the cove from the base but since we haven’t yet installed the chain ferry that Hazel and I keep trying to persuade Jo that we need, it takes about an hour to walk to, especially if carrying a tent, stove fuel and food. On our way over there we met a number of Elephant seals, both male and female, lounging on the beach. Now the Ellies have been slowly returning to the beaches over the past few weeks. The males are here to establish themselves as beach masters on their chosen bit of shoreline and the females to give birth and then mate again. We wandered along the beach chatting to the seals and encouraging the females to pop their pups out so we could see one. Unfortunately none complied there and then so we continued on our way.

We arrived at Penguin River around 1500 and decided that we would camp ON the river. Of course it is frozen but there is also a small gravel bar in the middle where the penguins sit when they are there so we pitched on what we hoped was that bar. Once we had pitched camp we decided to make the most of the sun before it dipped behind the mountains and so we wandered up to Discovery point. This is one side of the entrance to Moraine Fjord and has a wreck of the Lyn, a fishing boat, on it. The other side of the entrance (Dartmouth Point) also has a wreck, the Maresco. I can’t remember which one grounded first in a storm but the other thought that the lights from the first ship meant that there was safety there, anchored, dragged and now there are two wrecks just sitting on the moraine bar. Luckily no one was hurt and no environmental damage was caused but there is a lot of driftwood that comes off them and arrives on the beaches. A good supply for woodwork. 

Campsite on the river       (photo: H. Woodland)

Campsite       (photo: H. Woodland)

Wreck of the Lyn    (photo: H. Woodland)

We walked right to the end of the point and discovered that it is rather a busy place with Furries and Ellies all over the place. There was one particularly large Ellie male  pestering two females who had made the mistake of hauling up near him. He obviously hadn’t read the manual that said that he has to wait till they have had their pups before trying to mate with them.

What big teeth I have!       (photo: H. Woodland)

 Standing in the sun it was a lovely temperature but as soon as the sun dipped below the mountains it was freezing. We hurried back to the tent and our big jackets which we had left there. After our sched (the call into base), a cup of tea and some rather good dehydrated beef stroganoff we chatted and lounged around the tent. A couple of hours later we realised that there was a light outside the tent so we opened the door to find a nearly full moon beaming down on us in all her glory. This precipitated a discussion as to whether it is a cat or a man in the moon (man obviously). We then lay in our sleeping bags with the tent door open chatting, sipping whiskey from my hipflask and just drinking in the glory of the night. 

View from the tent

Next morning      (photo: H. Woodland)

 The night was less glorious when we were trying to sleep and our noses were too cold to stick out of the bags (we discovered later that it was a balmy -10°C that night). We awoke to a less glorious morning but we packed up and after another wander up to Disco Point to see if the two females had popped yet (they had disappeared, obviously the males advances were a little too amorous for them) we returned to base. On the way back we noticed a fairly large amount of blood soaked into the snow. We thought it might have been from males that had had a fight but upon closer inspection I noticed black fur among the blood so we looked harder and behind a female Hazel spotted the first Ellie pup of the year. He was so sweet. They are covered in longish black fur and are a sack of bones to begin with. They then suckle the unbelievably rich milk and fill out almost before one’s eyes. They have an imperious, barking call and hearing mum and pup chat is a real experience.

Warning: this next paragraph is detailed in its description of an Ellie seal birth; if squeamish move onto the next paragraph. 

After that the weather clagged back in but today (Sunday) it cleared enough that we decided to go out on a pup hunt. Hazel, Jo and I headed round the beach to Penguin River and kept our eyes peeled for any pups. At Susa Point, right opposite the base, Hazel’s trained medical eye spotted an uncomfortable looking female. We went up to have a look and sure enough under her back flippers were another smaller pair peeking out. We backed off a little bit and waited. It took a while. The mother had to shoo away a couple of skuas (large seabirds) that were a little too close. She would give a push and a bit more of the back would appear then it seemed to be sucked back in. We had almost given up hope that she would birth before we got too cold to stay standing around when she gave a final roar and a push and out slithered this wet bundle of fur that lay very still on the snow. We looked at each other while it lay very still and unmoving. Just as we began to be really worried it gave a little cough, rolled over and gave an imperious bark demanding milk. We all beamed and watched as an obviously quite tired mother nuzzled it. After a little while the placenta came out and then there was a slightly gory tug of war between a skua tugging on the placenta and eating it and the pup still attached to it by the umbilical cord. This is entirely normal and no damage is caused, it actually helps the umbilical cord to detach.

First pup      (photo: H. Woodland)

 

Just look at those little whiskers!

Ellie family

There were other pups lying around, all less than four days old and all calling to their mums or snoring softly in a milk induced sleep. It was quite a wrench stopping myself from taking one back to base to keep in the hypothermia bath. I am sure that Nido (the powdered milk we use) mixed with Glen Delight (‘cream’ that has never seen a cow) would be a fine meal for a growing pup.

Soon the beach in front of the base will become a real nursery and fighting ground and I for one am looking forward to it enormously.

Weather

One of the main issues about living on a Sub Antarctic Island is that sometimes the weather gods remember that they have been rather too kind to you recently and make up for it. Last week was utterly glorious, really stunning weather that made the world seem like it was made out of cut glass. This week, after Monday when I took the opportunity to change all the fuel filters in the jet boats, the weather turned in a nasty way.

The combination of wind and snow meant that venturing out of Everson and down to the boat shed was an adventure in itself. I couldn’t open the engine bays because I didn’t want to expose the engines to the type of fine driving snow that managed to get into my pit room through a closed window. We wore snow goggles to go anywhere and I was restricted to inside jobs. Hazel very kindly helped me to do the lifejacket service which is a big job by yourself but we managed to do in two days. I had to take two jackets out of service but luckily they were spares so no one had been wandering around with non functional lifejackets which was a relief. 

On Monday, as well as the fuel filter servicing, I helped Hazel give a first aid session to the crew on the Pharos. We went through basic stuff and what they could do with their equipment on board. It used to be on ships that you only had to have done one first aid course ever in your career and Hazel said that most of the crew on the JCR had last done one in 1998. This is insane. The CPR protocols alone seem to change every few years. In 1998 the ratio of breaths to compressions would have been probably about 5:2 (15 compressions to 2 breaths) but now it is 30:2 because they have discovered that maintaining the pressure (through compressions) is only possible by keeping the number of compressions high and that air is drawn into the lungs through the action of compression any way. This is all changing and now the Master of a ship has to do a course every 5 years which is important since they are usually the medic on board. Anyway. We did the first aid course and it seemed to go very well so we are going to try and incorporate a scenario into a session next week.

On Friday I had to take Pat out to a couple of shops for Transhipping paperwork. We caught a lull in the wind and took it. Doing prestart checks when the wind is driving spindrift into your ear is not fun. In the middle of the night the ships had to break off their work and leave the bay the weather was so bad. Also on Friday we celebrated Chilean Independence day (about half of the crew on board the Pharos is Chilean) with a big BBQ in one of the holds in the Pharos. It was very impressive the way they had got things like disco lights and a good sound system together in the hold. After the BBQ we had games. These were all ‘mess’ games and were quite physical and good fun. The most fun was tug of war where we sat in a line, each person holding onto the person in front and the person at the front holding onto a stick. When Go was shouted we had to get the stick off the other team. Hazel was sitting behind me and crushed most of my abdominal organs up into my ribs which meant that I was very nearly sick into Rod’s ear but luckily it all came right in the end. It was a really lovely night, the only thing to mar it was the fact that I was on lates and nearly got blown over by the wind when coming from the fuel farm back to the base.

The only thing to do on a weekend with weather like this is to spend it in the chippy shop. Hazel and I were in there most of the weekend, mainly making a mess. It is good to have two of us we decided since it means that we can help with power tools and can check each other’s maths when it comes to cutting bits of wood and checking we are cutting the mitre joints the correct way round.

It was Hazel’s Saturday cook this week so I gave her a hand in the kitchen. She made incredibly delicious tartlets with stilton, spinach and pecans, followed by chicken stuffed with brie, wrapped in bacon and mustard, served with Hasselback potatoes, broccoli and green beans. For pudding she made a cherry almond tart which was utterly delicious. All in all it went down very well.

Of course, the weather gods have decided to laugh at us again and we woke up to perfect weather this Monday morning which is deeply annoying but it does mean that I will be able to get into the engine bay and star the myriad services that all seem to have come up on AMOS at the same time.

Hut Inspection Tour - or the "I Actually Get To Work Here" Tour

Right up until Friday evening this week has been utterly beautiful, bright blue skies, diamond snow and only one snow flurry. The GOs therefore decided that this week would be a very good one to do a hut inspection tour. This meant that we had the arduous task of boating, in wonderful weather, to every hut except for St Andrews, checking the overall condition, doing an inventory of the contents, checking the first aid kits and replacing items where necessary and taking some ‘baseline’ photos of the inside and the outside. There are 6 huts within our travel limits and 3 outside of them: St Andrews, Sorling, and Corral on the Barf peninsula, the Greene hut on the Greene peninsula, Maiviken and Harpon on the Thatcher peninsula and Carlitta, Jason Harbour and the Tonsberg huts on the Busen peninsula. The Busen peninsula is not within BAS travel limits so only the GOs and visiting scientists can use those huts. We did not visit St Andrews or the Tonsberg huts because they are outside of normal boating limits and both of them had recently been restocked and inventoried. Jo, Hazel and I had done Maiviken when we went there for our holiday so that left us only 6 huts to check.

On Tuesday we went down East Cumberland Bay in the afternoon to visit Sorling and Corral. We had to negotiate some ice but all was lovely until we had to leave Sorling and looked towards Corral: of course the only place in the entire sky with a big black cloud over it. 

Guess where we were headed.....

 We put our buffs (neckerchiefs) and goggles on and proceeded to make our way in a bit of a snow storm and then came home to prepare for the slightly longer trip round to West Cumberland Bay on Wednesday. 

It was an absolutely glorious ‘dingle’ day, bright, bright sunshine, not a cloud in the sky and not a drop of wind. After a false start (a flat camera battery and a forgotten bit of kit) we finally headed out into the sun. It was about a half hour/ forty five minute run up to Harpon and when we got there Joe took Jo, Rod, Hazel and Nik ashore and then waited inside the moraine line while I waited on  the Jetboat outside the moraine. Moraine is the rocks and substrate that can be found on a glacier. When a glacier melts and retreats moraine is deposited, quite often as a barrier behind which there is deep water in a fjord leading up to the glacier face. The moraine that the RIB had to negotiate was deposited by the Lyell glacier which in summer time is black with moraine sitting on it.  Once we had recovered our inspectors we nipped across the bay to Carlitta. There I left Jo in charge of the jetboat and I took her place in the inspection team and Joe replaced Rod. This gave me a chance to get ashore. It is one of the very very few downsides to being the boating officer; when people need to be taken into places the boating officer takes them to the bay but usually never gets to go ashore since they are manning the boats. This time however I got ashore and it was wonderful. The hut at Carlitta is modern, no wooden shack here, it felt rather like the Hilton compared with the huts we have access to.

We inspected, inventoried, removed the first aid kit completely and then returned to the jetboat for a well earned lunch in the sun. Pat had asked us to go and take some photos of the Neumayer glacier to check how much it had retreated. This was not a chore! We went up to the face of it and when I looked at the chart plotter I found that the face of the glacier had moved by 3.5 nautical miles from its position appearing on our chart dated 2001.  It was quite a funny feeling to be seeing my vessel symbol on land and knowing that it wasn’t a satellite error. On our return up the fjord Nik spotted a big leopard seal so we hung around a bit having a look at him and enjoying his presence. It is always a little disconcerting seeing how little they are bothered by us and knowing that it is because they know they are at the top of their particular food chain – which include us!

The RIB against the Neumayer Glacier

Leopard Seal   (photo: R Strachan)

On our way to Jason Harbour, further up West Bay, we had to curtail our trip. We suddenly realised that the Pharos was coming back from a fishing inspection and there were not enough people on base to tie her up. So we had to race her back to base. She had a huge headstart but considering that we were going at 25kts to her 10kts (we had to wait for the RIB, the jetboat can do 31kts) it was a pretty unequal contest. It was probably for the best that we returned when we did, the joy of the clear skies and the sun did mean that it was really rather cold and it took all of us about an hour to regain full feeling in our feet.  We will just have to return to Jason Harbour to do that inspection at a later date.

The last hut we needed to inspect this week was the Greene. To get there you have to go into Moraine Fjord which the jetboats can’t do, so it was the RIB Luna to the rescue. Rod, Hazel and I were expecting everybody to want to come since it was such a beautiful day but in the end it was only us three. Getting into the fjord was touch and go. There was a huge amount of ice that had come from the glaciers at the head of the fjord and at one point we really weren’t sure that we were going to be able to get to the hut. I drove the RIB and both Hazel and Rod, who are mad keen photographers, were in seventh heaven with the shots that they were able to take. By the time they had finished at the hut the ice had moved which meant that we had to go further into the fjord to get round it. Since we were doing that anyway we decided it would be criminal of us not to go and check the Harker and Hamburg glacier, which we duly did.

That is a lot of ice!  (photo: H Woodland)

Pipit  (photo: R Strachan)

  To end that rather wonderful Thursday we had doc school. Now usually this is quite popular but this doc school was on cannulating – inserting a thin tube into a vein - so we had fewer takers than normal. Jo, Daniel and I arrived slightly nervously at the surgery and sat down for a lesson. Hazel and I had made a fake arm earlier in the week for us to practice on but unfortunately the only tubing we had to hand was rather tough so we didn’t get quite the feeling we should since you definitely don’t need to push that hard to get a needle into a real vein. I am an advanced first aider and have practiced cannulating on a proper fake arm a number of times, Daniel is the BAS advanced first aider so was able to practice cannulation on his course and Jo has done it as well so at least we weren’t going into it completely cold, but it was with slightly sweaty palms and a few nervous jokes that I prepared to cannulate Daniel. It didn’t go as well as it could have but my second go, on Hazel, went better so I have now cannulated someone and could do it in an emergency if I had to. I think if I was doing it for real my palms would be even sweatier though!

Our Saturday night cook was one with a difference this week. Sue made the pit room corridor into a mock up of an airliner and we all sat in the seats with trays on our laps pretending to be on a flight. It was incredibly well done and the food, delicious as always with Sue, was served in foil tins on plastic plates with plastic cutlery. It really was an amazing feat of imagination and I don’t think anyone else could have pulled it off. These are the things we have to dream up to keep ourselves amused!

On Sunday Hazel, Jo and I went for a slightly drizzly walk to Penguin river. This was to get off base but also to see if we could find any Elephant Seals who had come ashore. We found a couple, one of whom had the most wonderful nose. They are fantastic creatures but you really don’t want to get in the way of their sighs, their oral hygiene leaves something to be desired!

A meeting of the Ellie Appreciation Society

Look at that nose!

Practising his roar

Furry Seal on his berg

Saturday was the 9^th anniversary of my father’s death. As we travelled around the bays in the glorious sunshine with the snow reflecting myriad suns from each crystal face I thought of the poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye:

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints on snow,

I am the sunlight on ripened grain,

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there; I did not die.

A comforting thought as I enjoyed the diamonds covering my world.