Random Writings

The second part of the climbing course involved building a 15m mast in the yard in Cambridge. The mast itself comes in 2.5m sections which get bolted together. Starting with the first two in place, we climbed up and hoisted a new section into place, then bolted it on.
 To keep it upright, there are six stay wires that get anchored and tensioned. These attach every three sections, but it’s not safe to climb more than two unstayed sections, so we had a set of temporary stays to attach instead. We built the whole mast in just less than one day – Kirsty and I topped it off with the last section.
The following day was spent doing rescue practice. Mike, our instructor, had brought the lovely Buffy up from Taunton and we had lots of fun retrieving her. Then it was time to take it all down again!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Antarctica.