Summer is icumen in…
October 20th, 2006…loudly squark pingu. Yes, the summer will soon be upon us and a lot’s happened since I last wrote.
It began with the Film Festival – this is Kirk Watson’s brainchild and he organised the first one last year. Many people made short (and not-so-short) films/videos and then the whole collection were then shown over an evening alongside a sumptuous meal. Of course, the week before was full of panicky people desperately hunched over their editing software or manically shooting the last shots of their creations and in the end we must have had around fifteen individual entries.
Everyone had to “trail” their film by producing a poster – here they all are:
On the night, Riet pulled out all the stops to give us a memorable dinner:
We began with canapes in the bar – home-made pate on toast (best use found so far for the half-tonne of liver in the meat freezer), mini pizzas, garlic mushrooms and the like.
Tom and Lowri help themselves
After the first few films we moved through to the Dining Room and had lemon sole with asparagus:
followed by chicken terrine with tomato sauce, green beans and potatoes
and then trifle and, eventually, cheese.
All this was produced from frozen, dried and tinned ingredients, all the fresh stuff having long since been used up.
The following week, the fire alarms went off just after lunch, and we found ourselves doing a fire and rescue exercise that Tim and Lowri had organised with various peoples’ help. The “fire” was in Giants House, which was suitably smoke-filled, and teams of rescuers wearing breathing apparatus had to go and rescue Jamie and Richard L, both suitably made-up to look burned! Unusually (I’m usually doing radio cover in a major incident) I got roped in to setting up the surgery and trying to remember how to set up intravenous drips, monitor patients and administer injections. The whole exercise was pretty effective in reminding us of how to deal with an emergency.
In the mean time, a lot of effort has been expended in getting the base ready for the coming summer season. The runway and hangar area have been cleared of snow, and we engaged in a three day “scrubout” session to clean the parts of the base other scrubbings haven’t reached recently. The place now looks shinier and the smell of cleaning products is beginning to wear off a bit!
Clearing snow off the runway
We’ve had unseasonably warm weather over the last couple of weeks, with temperatures hovering around freezing and climbing to +3 today. As a consequence, our nice hard snow has turned to soft, stodgy, crystalline clag and there are pools of water forming under some of the buildings. The apron and runway in particular are now pretty boggy. The sea-ice is looking pretty rotten too, and there’s definitely open water only a few miles away.
Our first aircraft of the season arrived yesterday – but they weren’t ours. Our location makes us the only sensible route in and out of the continent in a small-to-medium sized aircraft, so we welcomed two planes from Kenn Borek Air Ltd, who specialise in Arctic and Antarctic operations and who operate under contract to the US, French and Italian Antarctic Programs, and the adventure tourism company ANI-ALE who will, for a hefty fee, organise expeditions to the South Pole or to climb Mt Vinson, the highest peak on the continent.
Anyway, a Twin Otter and a Basler BT-67 (an old Douglas DC-3 rebuilt with turboprop engines) arrived from Punta Arenas, bringing us seven enthusiastic Canadian aircrew and a six boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables! They even managed to arrive about an hour before dinner, which was pretty much perfect timing. This morning they’ve packed up again and flown on to the South Pole before making their onward journey to McMurdo tomorrow. We’ll see them again at the end of the season on their way home.
Basler BT-67, C-FMKB, on the apron at Rothera. This is a new plane this year and they’re very proud of it!
Today’s lunch – I was flight following so Agnieszka brought me a tray of lunch to eat in the tower. Look- salad! Mmm… crunchy vegetables…mmm!
Oh, and yesterday morning we had the extremely unusual appearance of three Emperor penguins at around 8am. They hung around for a short period, then waddled off!