teeks

Our visitors have had a taste of winter weather over the last few days, with lots of snow and winds up to 55 knots. As a result there’s no work outside, and mugs like me have an increased work load because all personnel movements between the buildings have to be logged and tracked … through me.

Still, at least they get to experience the Antarctic in high winds. Which is as much fun as the UK in high winds, when it’s -10 and snowing…

Here’s JD, with a face full of the Antarctic

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I was fortunate enough to have a day trip to the coast a few weeks back, for some extreme ice climbing halley style. What’s so extreme? Well, I climbed with only 1 pair of gloves! Yeah, we know how to push the envelope.

Ohh and we had killer whales surfacing and saying hello in the background.

Ohh, a big wall of ice. I know, let’s through ourselves off it, and then climb back up. Twice

Me

Rich dangling and keeping an eye out for ninjas

Rich’s point of view upwards…

Killer whales about a 100metres away from our climbing spot, they’re really noisy when they surface, we could hear them from the caboose which is about 1k away

Me going up. Horrible stance and technique = knackered bloke upon reaching the top

Ant tries the tough bit. He’s scared of heights … which is a great motivator for reaching the top

He never made it up. The section in this pc shows it was actually an overhang, and only Rich B and JD made it

The view from the top belay

Brave Vicky making sure Brave Rich reaches the top unhurt

As usual, more photos to be found in my gallery… Big thanks to Richard B and Richard C for the photos.

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Flying around Antarctica must be a pilot’s dream. No stuffy air traffic to contend with, a vast open expanse to fly over, visiting exciting things like mountains, rocks, not-snow-stuffs, sub-zero temperatures, the ever-present danger of landing on (and then in) a crevasse … ahhh a dream indeed.

Each flight out of Halley is usually followed on the radio by yours truly, but I was lucky enough to sit as co-pilot one beautifully sunny day …

Co-pilot is a bit of a misnomer. We do get to fly the plane for a bit, but it’s during the flying-level-and-straight-not-wobbly-at-all-at-altitude section of the journey. I had the controls for maybe 30 minutes of our flight, and I was more than happy to land the plane but alas, our Pilot Mark told me that I wasn’t insured, so in the unlikely event of landing ok and then taxiing into another plane meant I wasn’t allowed. The fact that the nearest plane was around 400 miles away wasn’t important. I also offered to take off, but Mark wasn’t having any of it.

Our job was to take Andy and his ozone monitoring equipment to Ozone Delta, 150 miles from base onto the Antarctic continent! You see, even though we’re definitely in the Antarctic, our base sits in an ice shelf – essentially a big block of floating ice, imagine an ice cube 150metres thick with a shed on top of it, that’s our home. So a trip onto the continent proper is a treat for the likes of me, who’s spent the last 13 months living on ice floating on the sea.

Mark’s a good bloke, and an awesome (to the max) pilot. We flew over the Hinge Zone, an area of incredible scenery such as; crevasses, more crevasses, cracks, holes, cliffs, more cliffs, big holes and big crevasses. It’s here where the icesheet (ice on land) ‘drops’ off the land and meets the sea and bumps into the iceshelf (ice floating on water) and this meeting is violent, but really slow … like 2 grannies drugged up to the eyeballs on sedatives wrestling in syrup in the cold.

Enough writing already …

The DHC-6 Twin Otter

Crevasses

A few more

Beggars Canyon?

Cloud (what, were you expecting something more eloquent on this website?)

Cool poster on the outside

The relief ramp with the base in the background

Next up, ICE CLIMBING!

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Since the last update, the summer season started, I worked my fingers to the bone, we’ve had relief (resupply from the ship), I went on a flight to the continent, winterers have left the base for good (so sad), the Halley VI construction started, I went ICE CLIMBING (YEAH!) and I fixed something. Ohh, and I turned 30.

Summer season, or ‘damn summer’ as I like to call it is a very busy time for everyone on base. Usually, the heady exciting world of comms heats up once the ship arrives – e.g. moving the VSAT dome and reconnecting with the satellite, moving the garage and Drewry and then reconnecting, flight following, radio scheds with field parties, preparing communal pcs for use, installing a bunch of new radios and antennae, training new people on radio procedures, laptop integration to our networks, training on phone systems + networks, account creation and a lot of other boring stuff. Normally there’s two, sometimes three comms people on base to handle this work once the ship moors up.

This summer was totally different, the base was about to absorb over 110 people, twice more than usual. As a result all the usual summer work listed above had to be finished BEFORE the ship arrived, and by one bloke … me. Bring it on I said, right before I broke down and started crying.

Not that I’m boasting or anything, but I managed to finish all the jobs a day before the ship arrived, working most nights til 28 o’clock – it was mental. Then relief started. Urgh

I was tasked with handling all communications, quite appropriate really. I managed/coordinated the day shift of vehicle movements bringing cargo to the base for the Halley V relief (base requirements + fuel), which took 5 days of 24hour shifts, 12 on, 12 off. Then, the Amderma, or as Dave christened it ‘The Mothership’ turned up like a massive thing turning up expectedly.

It’s a bit bigger than our usual resupply ship, the Ernest Shackleton. It can carry ten times the cargo than the Shack, which is handy because it carried over a 10 times the cargo for this relief alone… Halley VI better be worth it omg.

A comparison …

The Shackleton unloads some cargo

The pointy bit of the Amderma, tis big and massive and hairy

The frames for the Halley VI build on top

Any ways, it brought many boxes and things to us, and relief ended with a huge sigh of relief [hahah I'm funny] to everyone on base, especially Vicky our base commander and Martin the vehicle logistics manager.

Next up, post-relief, a jolly in a twin otter and ice climbing with whales.

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