Random Writings

Rothera has a rather end-of-term feeling at the moment. The field parties have returned to Rothera (and some to the UK), Sky Blu has closed up for the winter, and Fossil Bluff should close today or tomorrow. A lot of people have left, or are about to leave, on the Dash-7, and two of the Twin Otters have headed back to the UK (as of this year they get maintained in Oxford rather than Calgary) this morning. They’re going a very circuitous route – from Rothera to Stanley, Montevideo, up through South America, across to Bermuda, St. Johns and and back to the UK via Greenland and Iceland. The rest of the aircraft will follow them next week. The base already feels a lot quieter. Everyone who isn’t wintering or leaving by air will leave on the RRS Ernest Shackleton at then end of March.

In other news, Rothera has a new webcam and I’ve put it and a load of other Antarctic webcams in the links column. You can now see what the weather’s like!

When I was at Fossil Bluff, I made some chutney and posted it back to a friend in London. He pronounced it “tasty”. I thought that I’d share the recipe, if anyone wants to make their own – although you could probably do it with fresh vegetables rather than dried!

I thus present the recipe for Antarctic Chutney:

– dried onions (some)
– dried apple rings (some)
– dried green beans (lots)
– sultanas (a few handfuls)
– filtered glacial meltwater
– 900ml malt vinegar
– Turmeric (couple of teaspoonfuls)
– Black peppercorns
– Coriander seeds (generous shake)

Put the onions and some water into a pan and heat and allow to soften. Add beans, apple rings, sultanas and more water and keep softening. Once all the vegetables are soft and breaking up, add the vinegar and spices and simmer gently for several hours until the mixture will stick to a wooden spoon. Put into jars. Cool. Eat.

By popular demand, here’s another video postcard: The weather at Fossil Bluff. I hope you enjoy it!

The job ad has appeared to be next year’s Comms Manager: http://www.bas.ac.uk/Employment/vacancies/job.php?id=444

So, I’m back. And I’ve had a shower. Although I’m so far retaining my Polar Hero Beard, which has reached the two-week stage. Some people like it. Other people laugh. Combined with the fact that I haven’t had a haircut since coming south, I’m now the hairiest person on the Comms team (Pete had his ponytail shaved off for charity whilst I was away!). But anyway, you’ll want to know what I did whilst I was away…

Two weeks’ growth…

So, I finally went to “the Bluff” on Tuesday 31st Jan, via Latady Island, which is in the South Pacific – though being small, flat and snow covered, it’s not your conventional Rogers-and-Hammerstein vision of that region! We went to collect a small physical science team (Georgina, Cathy, Tom and Andy) who’d been drilling ice cores and retreiving a weather station – the latter was particularly exciting as it had been buried in several metres of snow and necessitating a vast hole to find it.

A first view of Fossil Bluff

Anyway, we arrived at Fossil Bluff with a full plane, and myself and the science team were left there – Alan took the plane back to Rothera with a bioscience team who’d been to Coal Nunatak the previous day. So the Fossil Bluff Motel and Diner found itself with a full house for the night!

The hut itself

Fossil Bluff (also known as “the Bluff” and “KG” – short for King George Sound) is BAS’s first and only station on Alexander Island, and was notable in being the only wintering base ever established entirely by air – it’s hundreds of miles from the open sea. It opened in 1961, and became summer only in the mid-70s. The hut and a lot of the fixtures and fittings date back to its early years, and it has a very pleasant and comfortable atmosphere. The hut itself is located at the foot of the huge scree cliffs that give the place its name, although it’s now nearly 1km from the skiway where the aircraft land – the Eros Glacier has retreated, living the hut high and dry on a ridge of moraine. In 1961 aircraft landed outside the front door!
Inside, there are four bunks, a table and chairs, some work surface, a cubby-hole with the radio and weather instruments and a Rayburn stove (perhaps the world’s most Southerly one!). The stove is the heart of the place – it burns the dregs of Avtur (aviation fuel) left in the bottoms of the barrels when the aircraft are refuelled – and is also used for baking bread and general cooking. It’s warm and cosy – Cathy described it as “Little House on the Prairie”, and it certainly feels like it. There’s even running water (on warm days) – a header tank is filled by meltwater coming down the valley behind the hut, and fresh filtered water is piped directly to the kitchen tap.

Rod and Riet in the hut

Outside the hut are a cluster of random little buildings. There’s a generator shed, containing a vintage Lister-Petter diesel generator, a food store (known universally as “Tescos” and painted with red, white and blue stripes) and a garage, which contains an ancient Muskeg tractor – a little tracked vehicle which drove to Fossil Bluff over the sea ice from Stonington in the mid-Sixties. There’s also the emergency caboose, which is an Antarctic caravan – it’s a little hut on skis, which has enough room for two people to live in. In days of yore it would be towed behind a Muskeg on long trips, providing accomodation for the team. Now it acts as overflow accommodation and a place to sleep if the hut ever burned down.

Emergency caboose (blue) and generator shed

Inside the caboose – a bit cramped for two!

Tescos!

Well-stocked shelves inside, although very little is in date!

The Muskeg in the garage

Living at the Bluff is like running a filling station, motel and restaurant for passing aircraft. The day begins at 0700, with the first weather observation, which gets passed to Rothera. You then give hourly observations until the aircraft no longer want them. If a plane comes in, you have to travel down to the skiway on skidoos and meet it. If the plane needs refuelling, you have to dig out the drums of Avtur and test them to check they’re not contaminated with water. Then there’s a little fuel pump (known as a Spate pump) which is powered by petrol and pumps the fuel into the aircraft. Other aircraft come in from Rothera on fuel runs – they land, drop off 4 or 5 drums of fuel onto the depot and then return, taking empty drums, rubbish and other cargo.
Often people get stuck at the Bluff because the weather worsens at their destinations, so they come back to the hut for tea/lunch/dinner/an overnight stay. We had ten of us there for several days, waiting for a weather window on Smyley Island that never came (the team went back to Rothera) and then several days with just three of us – Rod, Riet and I – sitting reading, cooking, digging depots and doing the odd bit of mountaineering close by.

On Giza Peak (also known as Sphinx, because of its shape)

Eventually our orders came on the radio – Riet and Rod were to return to Rothera, to be replaced by Pat and Richard, and I was going to Sky Blu. Then the weather worsened again. Finally, one afternoon, we got an Iridium phonecall. Someone at Sky Blu was ill – they were sending an aircraft – could we fuel it, and could I take the plane to Sky Blu? So I packed my baggage and took the late night plane – we arrived there at midnight (in broad daylight) and Alan returned to Rothera at 4am!
Sky Blu is a completely different kettle of fish. It’s another two hours south of the Bluff, and is “properly Antarctic” – never above freezing, covered in snow, and with a vicious wind that blows up the snow so you can’t see what you’re doing. This same wind scours snow off the surface, so instead of forming a bumpy snow-covered glacier it forms a sheet of perfectly flat and level blue ice. This ice gets covered in a thin layer of snow, but is usable as a runway for wheeled aircraft (including BAS’s Dash-7) as it’s cleared by a snowblower. The facilities are considerably more basic than Fossil Bluff, too: a fibreglass “Melon” hut with a little paraffin heater and a (slightly scary) two-burner petrol stove, plus a Weatherhaven tent (like a farmer’s polytunnel, only better insulated) and a few BAS Pyramid tents. There’s also an underground garage, cut out of the ice with a wooden roof. I spent three days there, two of which were spent largely inside the Melon hut, cheek-by-jowel with everyone else.

The Melon hut at Sky Blu – on a nice day!

Jamie and Georgina inside the Melon hut – it’s cramped with ten inside!

Orange boilersuits are all the rage in the Antarctic…

Twin Otter, on ice

Dash-7

On the third day the weather was clear. One plane that had stayed with us for a few days went off to Smyley Island to do more ice-coring, then we had another plane arrive aiming to go and pick up a field party on the Rutford ice stream, then the Dash-7 on a fuel run (a very impressive sight) and then another Otter on a transfer from Halley. This plane picked me up and took me back to Rothera – end of trip!
Arriving back at Rothera the weather is damp and warm and miserable. And dark. I came out of the bar at around 1130 to find it actually properly dark for the first time since I arrived. Winter is coming…

Lots more pictures of the trip – I will try and do some video editing this week, as I have about three video postcards in the pipeline!

Fossil Bluff has been fogged in for the last few mornings, but it looks like I might finally go today… we’ll see!

Yesterday we had a visit from our American friends on board the research ship Laurence M Gould, who tied up at the wharf and came ashore for an evenings entertainment. This is a regular social visit, which happens a) because they’re passing by us anyway and b) because US research vessels are “dry” and they like to come to a British base for a beer!
We put on a good show for them – the final ever Tepid Stan gig in the Sledge Store and a good time was had by all.

This morning I’m supposedly (weather-permitting) off to Fossil Bluff to stay for a week or so. I may be longer than that! If you want to contact me during that time, you’ll need my BAS email address (the one that begins mrpr@south) and be prepared for your message to be read out over the radio! Actually, one of the things I’m doing is working on an experimental system to send email over the radio as a data transmission, so we’ll see how well that works…

Now that the sea ice has cleared out, the boating season is in full swing: Rothera has five inflatable boats which are mostly used to support diving and marine science, but on Saturday afternoons the boatmen (Andy and Bernard) do pleasure cruises to the Leonie Islands, which are a few km from Rothera.

Rosie and Bernard model the Rothera Nautical Collection

I was on one of these last Saturday, and enjoyed myself hugely. You start in the boatshed, and manoeuvre yourself into a big orange survival suit (orange clothing is de rigeur down here, you get used to it!) and then walk down the slipway to the boats. We spent a very pleasant afternoon whizzing around looking at icebergs, penguins, cormorants and other wildlife, and then headed over to Lagoon Island for a cup of tea. Lagoon is named for the shallow lagoon in the centre of the island, which is a popular spot for elephant seals – we saw a large number of juveniles dozing in the summer sun – and has a pleasant little wooden hut which is used for biosciences expeditions and jollies throughout the year.

Juvenile elephant seals – they grow a long snouty nose in adulthood

Lagoon Island Refuge

Andy and Layla have tea at Lagoon

Fortified by a cup of tea made on the Primus stove, we headed back to Rothera, but stopped to take pictures of a leopard seal lounging on a small berg. Leopard seals are the only really dangerous animal down here – a young biologist, Kirsty Brown, was drowned by one a few years back – and they eat penguins and (sometimes) other seals.

Leopard seal

In this case, the pictures really are worth a thousand words!

Apologies for the ‘radio silence’ since New Year but, as many of you have guessed, I’ve been very busy indeed. We’ve been a little bit short-handed in the comms team since all three of our radio operators have been away working at Fossil Bluff and Sky Blu, two remote fuel depots that get used to refuel aircraft during the summer season. Actually, only two of them have been away at a time – just after Owen returned from Sky Blu, Mark’s gone out to replace him. This is a rather roundabout way of saying that Andy and I have worked extra shifts on the radio and have had relatively little time off, especially at weekends. Anyway, we’ve also been doing some project work as well as the usual flight following and field party scheds – we’ve been building a Really Big Antenna! This is like a giant TV aerial and is mounted on top of a stumpy little tower on top of Rothera Point – and it can be turned around by an electric motor to direct the signal to distant field parties. The proper name is the RLPA – the Rotatable Log-Periodic Antenna, and we’ve been working on it since just before New Year.

The tower, before the antenna and gearbox were fitted

We started in the aircraft hangar, putting together a giant Meccano kit made from aluminium with very poor instructions. If you think IKEA instructions are incomprehensible, don’t buy one of these! The boom that supports the antenna elements is 40 feet long (sorry for the imperial units – the antenna is made in the USA so all the dimensions are in feet and inches…)
and is held together with about two hunded nuts and bolts, all of which we did up by hand.
Having built all this, Mat the Mechanic helped us load it onto a flatbed trailer, and we dragged it up the hill to finish the assembly. Attached to the boom are 16 elements, which are tapering aluminium tubes that extend from each side. These are very long and quite whippy. At each point where the aluminium tubes join we had to polish the joint with emery cloth and apply an anti-oxidant grease to make a good electrical connection.

Once the antenna was assembled, the fun part began. We had to move it about twenty metres across an uneven snow surface and then hoist it onto the top of the tower and fasten it to the rotator. After a few ideas were considered, we went for a “people power” approach. Fourteen of BAS’s finest staff lifted the antenna off the trailer and carried it across to the waiting crane. Several tense minutes and a good deal of “left-hand-down-a-bit”, jiggling and brute force later, Andy and I bolted it to the rotator mountings and breathed a sigh of relief!

People power!

Easy does it…

Up and away!

Bolting it on

Since then we’ve been doing the much more tedious job of cable laying- all sorts of power, data and signal cables have to be fed out to the antenna and its ancillary kit, so we’ve been dragging cables across the frost-shattered rock surface of the point and laboriously attaching them to catenary wires with cable ties. Actually, Andy’s done most of the laborious attaching, and I’ve done most of the laborious ladder-repositioning, tool-passing and cable untangling. We’re now about 60% done on the cables – they just need to go across the yard to the Ops Tower – Pat’s been showing us how to use the “cherry-picker” hydraulic platform today, but it was too windy to do any work with it this afternoon, so that’s a project for tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll have the system all wired up by the end of next week.

Thanks to Agnieszka for her excellent photographs and mast-climbing skills! There are more pictures here.

As I write, the Christmas decorations have been taken down and the base has resumed normal life again. Mind you, the place was only lightly touched by the festive hysteria that occurs back home – we’re right in the middle of our busy season, so we can’t afford to take lots of time off! In fact we had Christmas Day and Boxing Day off, plus New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Christmas Day itself dawned under leaden grey skies (just like home!) and a light flurry of snow. After a slow and quiet morning, most of the base went off to the ski slopes and then returned for the full festive dinner at 5pm. I had to work, though – field parties still need a daily radio call – but a lot of people came up to the radio room to wish them a happy Christmas.
New Year provided an ideal opportunity to show off the finely-polished musical talents of the base to the various new arrivals. Two bands, a freshly-formed Summer Band and the veteran winterers Tepid Stan, performed to a packed Sledge Store and received a very warm reception from the assembled crowd. The following day dawned bright and clear with just a few people up and about by lunchtime, although many went out skiing or boating in the afternoon. It was very pleasant, and rather more relaxed than back home!

A lot has happened since I last wrote – I’ve been very busy indeed and haven’t had a chance to sit down and write. I’d no sooner got the smell of Avtur (aviation fuel) out of my clothes than Andy and Owen, two of my colleagues on the Comms team, were sent down to Sky Blu to man the depot there. This left just three of us (myself plus Mark and Pete) to cover all the flying and field party scheds, so we’ve been working pretty hard.
We’ve had a lot of people come and go through the station in the last fortnight – we started with a team of four pilots from the German antarctic research programme, who arrived from Punta Arenas in their Dornier 228 aircraft. The Dornier is a bit bigger than our Twin Otters, and slightly faster, but it requires a much longer runway. In fact, it needed almost the entire runway before it was airborne, which is distinctly nervewracking! They stayed for one night and then flew on to Halley – from there they transfer to Neumayer, the German base in Dronning Maud Land.
We also had two of our Otters make the long flight to Halley – one went to stay for the duration of their season (until the end of February) and the other returned a few days later, via Berkner Island and Sky Blu, bringing back a few staff who needed to make a quick exit and a whole pile of parcels to be sent back to the UK.
After that, everyone’s mind was on the imminent arrival of the James Clark Ross, bringing food and cargo for the station. It got very close to Rothera but then became stuck in the ice near the southern end of Adelaide Island. I was lucky enough to go out on an Ice Observation flight in the Dash-7: this involved flying a number of low passes over the ship and surrounding sea to try and find breaks in the ice and was very exciting! However, all looked black the following day when it became clear that ship was not making any progress and eventually the captain decided to turn around and look for another route. 24 hours later, though, the ship had slunk through between the areas of hard ice and was steaming across Margerite Bay towards Rothera. Thus began the Relief of Rothera – the process of unloading all the cargo for the coming year. In fact, the JCR was supposed to go out and do a small science cruise in Ryder Bay, but the ice conditions prevented this from going ahead – so we had our full relief a little earlier than anticipated. It really was a case for everyone to muck in and shift the cargo and pack it away. Most days a party of up to 30 Rotherans would be called down to the food bays to stow away all the boxes and tins of food that the ship had brought – human chains of people shifting endless tins of mushrooms will be one of my memories of Rothera!
Around the same time as the ship arrived, the Dash-7 went north to Stanley with a few people whose work was already completed, and took more people out to meet HMS Endurance and prepare for fieldwork on the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula. It returned in the middle of relief – the base suddenly seemed full of people and the queue for dinner stretched right across the dining room and onto the stairs. Then, just as suddenly as it had arrived, the JCR sailed off into the not-sunset leaving us piles of stuff to sort out. We’ve also welcomed the rest of the new winterers and a few more summer staff to the base – they’re all getting used to life on land again after up to three weeks at sea!