Random Writings

…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!

It’s the little things, you know, that make the place feel different. Here are a few of them:

• Static electricity – if you’re not careful in your choice of footwear (trainers are bad) then you get electric shocks off everything and anything. The dry air is the main culprit here – it’s much easier for a charge to build up.
• Leftovers – we often eat leftovers for lunch, as we like to try and minimise food wastage. Some things get recycled into other things – so left-over pasta’n’sauce is often put in a baking tray, given a topping of grated cheese and then baked in the oven. The best recycled food this winter has been a carrot cake whose major ingredient was left-over carrot and orange soup. Oh, and the soup had been made from canned carrots and orange juice concentrate. It sounds foul but was actually delicious!
• Toilets in most of the buildings flush with seawater (fresh water takes a lot of electricity to produce) so you can sometimes smell the sea in your bathroom
• Catering-size everything – giant tins, giant bags of dried food, giant dishes and giant sinks to wash them up in. I think that going back to a domestic kitchen’s going to feel rather cramped.
• Fresh bread every day – or nearly every day. We have a good selection of bread flours (plain white, wholemeal, malted, etc) and we usually have a fresh still-warm loaf or rolls with our lunch. There are also conventional tin loaves for toast and sandwiches. But it’s a far cry from supermarket plastic white!
• Boneless meat – to avoid introducing diseases into the wildlife, the Antarctic Treaty forbids the import of any animal bones. For the same reason waste meat products are incinerated (in the nominally monthly “meat burn”) rather than going down the waste-disposal (“muncher”) and into the sewage treatment plant and then into the sea.
• After a few weeks watching the aircraft come in to land you can tell which pilot is approaching from their style of flying!
• Fox Hat. This is our twice-weekly film night (Wednesday and Sunday) in the bar. There’s a Fox Hat rota, and the person who’s night it is gets to choose a short (usually an episode from a TV series) and a main feature film. Some people rapidly get a reputation for good/bad Fox Hats so the question “whose Fox Hat is it tonight?” is loaded with significance! Oh, and the name comes from a media visit some years ago by a team from Fox Productions, who were afforded lots of help by the base team and faithfully promised to send a parcel of goodies to say thank you. When the parcel eventually arrived it consisted of one branded baseball cap. After some deliberation, it was decided that the hat should be worn by the person choosing the film… although the hat has now vanished!
• Wearing sandals and socks indoors is not considered a fashion crime at Rothera, in fact, it shows your acceptance of base life! Some people do pad around in just their socks (especially in the summer) but this leads to accelerated sock wear and eventual deterioration of the socks themselves. Of course, some people choose to dispense with wearing socks at all whilst on base. Similarly, wearing orange clothing (boilersuits, fleece tops, jackets, etc) and thermal baselayer tops is considered normal behaviour.
• Fostering an unusually precise obsession with the weather. We all look at the display from the automatic weather station with alarming regularity, and have become quite good at guessing temperatures and wind speeds from a 1 minute walk across the yard between Admirals and Bransfield.
• Sewing. Many people have learned to use the sewing machine in Fuchs House and some are pretty expert with it. This comes in handy for running repairs, but also for making costumes for fancy-dress nights! It’s not uncommon to see people wearing jeans/shorts/shirts/whatever patched or even bulked out with different coloured fabric – orange tent fabric is a popular choice.
• Drinking unusual drinks, or indeed unusual combinations of drinks, when the bar is suffering a shortage of something. After an evening in which several people developed a taste for White Russians (Kahlua, vodka and milk) there were then some further variations with Kahlua, amoretto and milk, and indeed the latter plus rum-and-raisin ice-cream!
• G&T on the V – gin-and-tonic on the verandah. Very British – Bransfield and Admirals both have a raised wooden deck outside, and the Bransfield one is a real sun-trap and can be very pleasant on a sunny afternoon, even if the air temperature’s below freezing. Shame about the shortage of gin!
• Wierd astronomical things – at our latitude we get funny effects with the moon. Sometimes it can be above the horizon all day (and visible, faintly) and at other times of the month it won’t appear at all for several days. We also quite often see satellites flashing in the night sky, not to mention the southern hemisphere constellations – and Orion upside-down!
• Finally, all the many, many forms of snow. There’s the urban myth that Eskimos (sorry, Inuit) have an unusual number of words for snow, but until you’ve been somewhere where there’s a lot of it, you don’t really appreciate how many kinds of snow there can be. Broadly speaking, we have: powdery snow, spindrift (fine blown snow that ends up in everything after a storm), soft slushy snow that falls in big flakes in warm weather, sleet, neve (pronounced nevvay) which is snow that’s frozen into a texture like polystyrene, and creaks when you walk on it and is good for making igloos out of, champagne powder (which is a mixture of fresh powder snow and ice crystals – lovely for skiing), not to mention soft snow with a hard crust (nasty stuff), hard snow with a dusting of powder on the top, snowdrifts, windscoops and sastrugi (ridges formed by the wind blowing over the snow)

Oh, and for those that don’t get the significance of the title of this posting, it comes from the film Pulp Fiction, where one of the (American) characters explains that in Europe MacDonalds have to call a quarter-pounder cheeseburger a “Royale with cheese” because Europeans use metric measurements. It’s the little differences, he says…

And it really does, too. Where did the winter go? Suddenly Mat and Tom are out clearing snow from the apron and runway ready for the planes to arrive in 3-4 weeks time. Another month has gone by, and I’m sorry for neglecting the writing and still photos in favour of videos recently. Here’s a brief catch-up of some of what’s happened…

Helen, stuck at Rothera on a winter trip in indifferent weather, pursuaded Tom M and various other people to help her build an igloo on top of the point. This is quite fiddly but very satisfying – you have to cut wedge-shaped blocks of snow using a saw and then position them carefully to make the dome shape. I turned up just as the last few courses of blocks were being placed, and got pressed into acting as human scaffolding, holding the blocks until they were wedged in and stable.
Helen and Ags spent the night in the igloo, but overnight the weather worsened and they woke up covered in 5cm of snow, which had blown in through the door and the cracks between the snow blocks. Subsequently, Helen’s packed the blocks with soft snow and built an entranceway around the door hole, which makes it much more weathertight!

Tom placing blocks

The completed igloo

In other news, I’ve been interviewed by The Guardian newspaper for a new feature called “Readers’ Lives”. I subscribe to the Digital Edition of the paper and print the weekend editions for everyone to read. When the weather’s bad everyone lounges round the dining room on a weekend morning, drinking tea and coffee, eating toast and reading the paper. It’s very civilised! Anyway, my interview should be in the Saturday edition of the paper.

I’ve also been out to help Helen do a CTD, watched by an interested but otherwise totally passive juvenile Weddell seal and tried to get all the IT and radio systems ready for the coming season. We’re also starting to clean and tidy the areas of the base that have been out of use for the last eight months, and tomorrow I’m on digging duty over by the hangar. Catch you later…

I’ve made a few tweaks to the way that the site works and added a couple of new features.

Firstly, the videos are now in a separate category of their own, so if you’re just interested in them, you can go to http://www.randominformation.co.uk/vlog/ and enjoy the site as a videoblog (or vlog).

Secondly, you can now subscribe to an email update service so that you can receive an email whenever I add new content to the site. There’s one for the whole blog and one for just the videos.

On Saturday four of us (Tom, Jade, Agnieszka and I) went out on the sea-ice to go and look for seal pups. We managed to find one!

To those of a cynical and hard-bitten disposition: the following video contains scenes of a very cute fluffy animal. You have been warned…

Last Sunday I was on gash – doing cleaning and domestic duties – so I thought I’d take the opportunity to show you some of what that involves, and what happens to all our rubbish.

Last week we were visited by a lone Emperor penguin – a rare sight in these parts. I have seen one only once before, back in November 2005. This time, I had my video camera!

Today we’ve had some properly nasty weather, after several weeks in the sunshine. Here’s a little video that gives you some idea what it’s like!

Leonie is one of the more prominent local landmarks – a big triangular rock-face that rises out of Ryder Bay – but it’s 9km away, and normally only accessible by boat. However, the sea-ice situation is now good enough to travel there and climb the mountain, so last week various groups went out to have a go.

Leonie Island – it’s the triangular face to the right of the big iceberg

To travel that distance we ride skidoos towing dog-sledges – these are Nansen sledges with a platform at the back for you to stand on. Originally they were towed by teams of huskies, hence the name.
The most prominent gully on Leonie fills with snow each winter and makes for a straightforward if quite long climb up to the summit. It’s known as “Gateway to Antarctica” in the climbing guide.
Tim, Jamie and I climbed it one afternoon – and enjoyed the view from the top in the sunset light.

Leonie from the bottom

Tim and Jamie on the summit

It is cold here today, and has been for a few weeks. Mind you, living here gives you a whole new set of meanings to the terms “warm” and “cold” – a “warm day” is anything above about -5! Yesterday we had the lowest temperature recorded this year, -30 Celcius, but it was a glorious sunny day with little or no wind, so four of us (Jamie, Mark S, Agnieszka and myself) decided to ski over to Lagoon Island as a day out. You might remember that I went to Lagoon at the start of my winter trip two weeks ago, but we weren’t supposed to have gone, given the sea ice situation. Well, in the last fortnight a lot more ice has formed, so we can now travel to Lagoon whenever the weather permits.
We skied out over a soft snowy surface on the sea-ice, making it much easier than it was last time, and reached the hut for lunch. It was bone-chillingly cold inside, as without either sunshine or exercise to keep you warm we were all pretty chilly even in down jackets. At these low temperatures your breath tends to freeze on the clothing and hair around your face, and those with beards (which currently includes me) find that they get ticklish icy lumps in them and then freeze to your balaclava, which is most uncomfy. Here we all are looking iced-up:

Agnieszka the meteorologist

Mark the builder / carpenter

Jamie the generator mechanic

I don’t seem so badly affected by facial ice – I think this is because I’m careful with my breathing to avoid fogging my spectacles

There are other fun things you can do in low temperatures – check out what -20 does to soap bubbles in this little video

In other news, this week Riet (our erstwhile Chef) has been on nightwatch duty, so it’s been a succession of volunteer cooks for the whole week. There became something of a competition over the week to produce interesting puddings, culminating in me making a Baked Alaska – which is sponge cake and ice cream covered in meringue and then baked at a very high temperature to brown the meringue without melting the ice cream.

Mmm…baked alaska!