The world outside my window

As I get up every morning I draw my curtain and look out to see what has changed in the night.  It is a view in fairly constant flux, notwithstanding the mountains in the way.

Directly below my window is a pebble beach about 10m wide at low tide. It is flat at the top and slops down to the water. Sprinkled on this beach are a good number of Elephant seals, down my end mainly weaners but up by the kitchen is a popular spot with the males and their harems. There is generally one beach master around and he sees off any competition. It can be quite disconcerting trying to eat breakfast and to hear world ending roaring coming from right outside. Generally at that point everyone in the dining room gets up and goes to the picture windows with their toast or tea and eats while watching the spectacle. We haven’t yet taken sides but it is only a matter of time. One of my favourite things to watch are the ‘high speed’ water chases. They generally start with a ‘Young Turk’ lurking in the shallows near the harem. When the beach master goes off to tend to one of his females the other side or to see off another contender this ‘Young Turk’ shoots up the beach. Now when I say ‘shoots’ he moves as fast as he can with waves of fat rolling up his body as he flings himself worm fashion along the pebbles. It is usually about now that the beach master notices and ‘shoots’ back across the beach to see this intruder off. This generally involves him scattering his females as he hustles through them. The intruder makes it to the water ‘swiftly’ followed by the beach master and then an underwater chase ensues. You can't see through the water but you know where they are even when submerged because of the bowwave they throw up as they go. It really is rather exciting to watch; but back to the view.

As I said, up my end of the beach there are no beach masters but there are weaners dotted here and there and in between them at the moment are Fur Seal males which have come ashore to gain their territories. Unfortunately the presence of these Furries does make opening one's window a gamble depending on the direction of the wind. They emit the most offensive smell, as I have described before, and to have it wafting in your room while trying to sleep is intolerable.

The beach below my window leads on to King Edward Cove which runs off from Cumberland Bay East. Across the cove is another beach and above that is a short sharp rise to Brown Flats. This is a boggy wet area below Brown Mountain which is the first thing I generally see in the morning. This is a longish low mountain which is a fairly easy day trip to do. At the bottom of the shoulder of Brown Mountain is an area of Tussock grass and then Penguin River. This runs through Hestesletten (a flat glacial plain) from the Hamburg Lakes which in turn are fed by Hamburg Glacier which is a hanging glacier. Along the beach from Penguin River one comes to Discovery Point which is one side of the entrance to Moraine Fjord. Just off this point lies the wreck of the Maresco a fishing vessel that foundered there. There is another fishing vessel, the Lyn, which foundered on the other side of the entrance to Moraine Fjord, Dartmouth Point. 

The daily changes in my view are caused by a number of different things. There is the wildlife which changes hourly but currently is mainly based around weaners and Furries. There is the snow and its presence or disappearance as dictated by the weather. Apparently the weather we are having at the moment is extremely unseasonal with incredibly strong winds (105kts recorded in the bay next to ours)and snow. This has meant that the flanks of Brown Mountain will have snow on them one day and then none the next and then a sprinkling laid on over night. Another thing that regularly changes is the presence of ice. The Harker glacier calves into Moraine Fjord and large chunks of ice are blown out regularly. They can then stick on the bottom and disintegrate slowly or be blown off out to sea. There is one across the bay currently which has the silhouette of a destroyer and when the sun hits it it glints in varying shades of brilliant blue.

I consider myself incredibly lucky to be able to wake up everyday, open my curtain and look on all of this, hopefully the changes will continue at this rate and I will continue to be as appreciative of it in a year as I am now. 

KEP from the Pharos

The view from my window

In at the Deep End

The day we arrived at KEP I woke up to find South Georgia going past my cabin window. The cliffs were black and foreboding, rising sheer out of the water into snow and mist above, obscuring the peaks. We rounded the corner at Hope Point to get our first glimpse of the base; home for the next year and more. The base itself is a collection of long low buildings hugging the beach with shipping containers scattered in between them. We tied up at the wharf with the people ashore helping us with lines. All along the beach were lying hundreds of Elephant seals. Huge beachmasters with ponderous noses, smaller females and in between them were the weaners; pups, growing fast and now huge sausage shaped balls of fat lounging, almost unable to move on the beach. These wonderful creatures are to be my close neighbours until they head off back to sea after the breeding season.

This was the moment of truth. I was about to step onto South Georgia and meet some of those who I would be spending the next year with, some whom would be leaving in a month and some in several months time. It was all rather blur of faces and names and handshakes but in the end I found myself standing in the dining room with everyone, having ‘Smokoe’ (coffee (in the morning)/tea (in the afternoon)). After that the day passed into a blur of familiarisation and training. The next time I could think I was walking with Rod (new BC), James (old BC), Daniel (seal man) and Paula (the other boating officer) on the track to Grytviken. This is an old whaling station 15mins round the bay. It is here that the only church on the island stands and that the South Georgia Heritage Trust (SGHT) has a tiny museum.

Grytviken is now a much smaller whaling station than it was because many of the structures were taken down before they fell on an unsuspecting tourist’s head. A fair few of the buildings are still there as are three old whalers that have been pulled up on the beach. These are rust buckets which are too dangerous to climb on but which give you an idea of the scale of the operations. These small vessels were what went out to sea to catch the whales and bring them back to the station for processing. I will describe Grytivken in more detail in a later blog

That night Matt (the Senior Boating Officer) took me along as an observer for a night pick up of Sue (new fish scientist) and Katie (old fish scientist) from the Pharos which had taken them for a plankton trawl of the bay. Night ops here are a very different beast from night ops in the UK. We had to have someone working the ice light for a start. This is effectively a search light which will pick out the gleam of ice in the water to give the coxswain a chance of missing it. Also there are no lights until we rounded Hope point and saw the loom of the Pharos’ ice light winking on her foredeck. The pick up was pretty easy and I got to see how Matt does it which was useful since he has been here for two years now and knows all the tips and tricks of picking up from a pilot ladder. 

Picking people up and dropping people off on ships will be largely the bread and butter of my work down here. The boatys are here basically to support the Government Officers (GOs) in getting them to the ships they need to inspect. The rest of the work is supporting any work that the GOs or the SGHT need done on shore (rat eradication etc), supporting any BAS science and then supporting recreation: getting our Base mates out to differing parts of the Barff or Greene Peninsula’s for their holidays.

Night ops is a slightly unusual event here and I was therefore very lucky to get to do one on my first night.

On Wednesday I got to do another unusual thing in an extended boating trip. We needed to take Pat (a GO (there are always 2 on the island, Keiron is the other one here at the moment, he came in on the Pharos with us)), Pecker, the chief builder and Liz, an architect, round to Stromness whaling station to look at the potential for maintenance of the Managers villa there. Normally there is a 200m exclusion zone around all the whaling stations due to the old tin roofs that could fly off in a gust of wind and the asbestos in the buildings. However, we had a permit so we could go ashore. We took the 3 mentioned above, John the Doc as the RIB cox, Matt as Harbour Launch Cox and myself. We took the Launch Pipit and the RIB Luna, loaded them up with all the kit we needed and headed round the corner to the North. Out of the normal boating limits we sped at a healthy 16kts along the same coast line as we had passed a few days earlier on the Pharos.

Extremely unusually and incredibly luckily we were allowed to tie up alongside the old wharf at Stromness which meant that everyone could disembark and have a look around the station there (normally the boaty has to stay at anchor watch). The first thing that hit me was the smell. It is the beginning of Fur Seal season and the males are starting to come ashore to create their territories and wait for the females to start the breeding season. The whole whaling station is a very ‘Furry’ area and the sweet, sickly, musky smell hits you hard in the nose with a wallop. Furries can be a problem and have been known to bite people pretty badly. This means that you have to have your wits about you and a ‘bodger’. This is a stick with which you can tap the ground in front of an aggressive Furry to make him (it is usually the males) back off. The smell comes in useful when among tussock grass or buildings because it alerts one to the presence of potential trouble before you can see it.

The manager’s villa that we had come to see was the one which Shackleton stayed in after he crossed the mountain range from the other side of the island. It is in fairly poor condition, along with the rest of the station but has been boarded up now to try and protect it somewhat from the elements. We wandered around the rest of the station while Liz did all she needed to on the villa. It was really quite eerie to see this ghost town, dilapidated and derelict with thick snow falling all around us. It added a real dream like quality to the place, especially when we saw the old cinema (a ruin) with the old projector still inside, albeit on its side now. We went into an engineering workshop which had a forge, steel rollers and a welding shop. There were store rooms stuffed with sheet after sheet of steel standing leaning against each other, filling the room; or pipes of all different gauges ranged along the wall. Basically anything necessary to repair or even rebuild a ship was there. There was also the human touch, with a leather welding mask sitting on the side waiting to be used once more. You could almost forget the reason for the presence of the station on the island until I noticed a rope ‘spout’ lying ready to be fixed back onto a whaler. It was a lid for the whale rope hatch with spout lined with wood to allow the easy progress of the rope once it had fired into the whale with the harpoon. A beautiful bit of engineering with a deadly purpose.

Once Liz had finished at Stromness we went round the corner to Husvik, another whaling station, where we dropped them off and stood off at anchor. By the time they had finished there the weather had cleared and it was late so we headed home with myself and John on the RIB. Speeding in the wake of the Jet boat I would have sworn that the Cape Petrel that was skimming just above the wave produced by her wake was doing so simply for the fun of it. As we went round the corner I had the leisure to watch the coast go by. The black foreboding cliffs were transformed by the sun into green but they still rose sheer, to cut the blue of the sky. The joy of the petrel, the thrill of travel and of seeing icebergs 10-20 miles off our port quarter and the daring of the cliffs to our right gave me the feeling that one could be challenged for survival here and it made me feel just a little more alive.

In my first week of being here I’ve had to throw myself into two unusual events for the base, I’ve had to show I could adapt and overcome challenges (having never reversed a trailer before I had to put the RIB back into a very tight boat shed) and I have managed to prove to myself that I can do this and I do deserve to be here. It has been an incredibly busy week but after jumping in at the deep end. I have found I can still swim.

Crossing the Polar Front

On Halloween we boarded the Pharos SG in the afternoon. The Pharos is the Government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands’ (GSGSSI) Fishery Patrol vessel. It is she who ensures that the fishery around South Georgia is sustainable by stopping illegal fishing and making sure that all fishing vessels comply with the regulations to get a licence to fish in these waters.

We had what felt like a bit of a false start because we left that afternoon to go round the corner to get fuel from the Naval base in East Cove. We left Stanley in very unusually calm weather and loitered in the sound waiting to go round to East Cove. While loitering most of us went up on deck and witnessed the most beautiful sunset over the hills of the Falklands. At the same time we were entertained by groups of penguins swimming home from the days fishing. It was quite an amazing site to see these beautiful, graceful birds porpoising through the wavelets, knowing how ungainly they would be as soon as they reached the beach at Gypsy Cove. It really felt like such a privilege to be standing there amidst all that beauty, watching PENGUINS in the water, rather surreal actually.

After refuelling, which took pretty much all day on Thursday, we left East Cove and started our journey properly in the afternoon. Even though there is very little swell the Pharos rolls unbelievably. I have to say that I would really not like to be on her in a big sea. We each have our own cabin which will be the last time we don’t share for a while. The cabins are a fair size with a bunk, a ‘day bunk’ (a sofa) a desk and a wardrobe. The routine on board is fairly monotonous, as passengers we aren’t put on either ‘cook’ or ‘gash’ (cleaning) duty so it is a case of trying to keep oneself busy. Most people have been watching films on their laptops. I have been sampling the delights of the onboard ‘library’ and varying that with trips to the bridge, walks on deck, bird watching, eating and sleeping. On Friday the Chief Engineer, Kim, gave us a tour of the engine room which was very interesting. The Pharos is a Diesel Electric ship which means that her five engines create power which is then transformed into the electricity which drives the propulsion. She was built for the Northern Lighthouse Board (in Scotland) and so she is incredibly manoeuvrable with rudders that can turn 70° at slow speed (most rudders only turn about 35°) and an extremely powerful bow thruster which means that she can go right up alongside buoys and lights to pick them up for maintenance. She is not ice strengthened but her bow is reenforced to deal with bumping into buoys.

The birds following the ship are phenomenal. I saw my fist ever Albatross!! A Black browed Albatross, soon followed by a Wandering Albatross, one of the biggest birds in the world. Others I have seen include: Grey-headed Albatross, Giant Petrels. Cape Petrels, Atlantic Petrels, Wilson’s Storm- petrel and a Prion but I couldn’t identify the species. It really is awe inspiring to see a Wandering Albatross with a wing span of 2.70-3.25m playing in the wind around the stern of the ship, swooping alongside  and hovering with a simple shift in feather alignment and to also see the Wilson’s Storm Petrel doing exactly the same thing but with a wing span of only 0.38-0.42m. I keep thinking how much my Grandfather would love to see these magnificent birds.

On Saturday we crossed the Polar Front (or Antarctic Convergence as it is sometimes called). We are now in really Antarctic waters, which was proved by the fact that instead of being pelted by rain on my trip around deck this morning I was pelted with wet snow. I was rewarded for my snowy sojourn on deck however when I saw a group of about 5 or 6 Antarctic Fur seals swimming alongside the ship, obviously on their way to South Georgia for the breeding season. The males arrive there in November and set up territories and the females arrive later in the month. 98% of the world’s population of Antarctic Fur Seal breeds on South Georgia, more than 3 million.

We arrived at King Edward Point (KEP) early on Monday morning and now the adventure really begins!