Over and out

So this is it. This time tomorrow (weather permitting) I will be aboard the Dash-7, flying over the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula on my way home from 18 months on the white continent. It is a strange time of conflicting emotions and difficult goodbyes, but rather than dwell on that I thought I would present you with a few facts and figures from the last 18 months:

• Nights spent in Antarctica: 476
• Blog entries written: 93
• Number of growing plants seen: 0 (I don’t count lichen)
• Number of photographs taken: 45,000
• Time spent transmitting on the HF radio: ~150 hours
• Time spent listening out for calls on the HF radio: ~50 days
• Number of meals eaten in Antarctica: 2142 (working on an average of 4.5 meals per day, which is what is needed to keep us going in this tough environment. He lied.)
• Number of pounds in weight gained: A secret, but it sounds better if you think of it as a wage supplement.
• Most penguins seen in a single day: >4000
• Number of live insects seen: 0 (but found a dead ladybird)
• Number of aeroplane take-offs and landings seen: ~160
• Coldest temperature encountered: -81 deg. C (in one of the laboratory bio freezers)
• Coldest outdoor temperature encountered: -26ish deg. C (at Sky-Blu, end of summer 2011-12)
• Warmest temperature encountered: 40-50 deg. C (in the Rothera sauna)
• Warmest outdoor temperature encountered: +5-6 deg. C (Rothera, summer 2012-13)
• Amount of imaginary money spent on beer, wine, chocolate and clothing: £1000 (just tick a box and it magically disappears from your account)
• Amount of hard cash spent: £0
• Most people seen in one place: ~100, during summertime Saturday night dinners.
• Number of bank-cards cancelled by Barclays for no apparent reason: 1 (and then try explaining to someone in a Barclays call-centre that you’re in Antarctica, it’s the winter, and they can’t ‘just post you another card’. Tossers.)
• Number of gloves lost: 10
• Number of big, woolly socks gained: also about 10
• Number of animal species seen outdoors: I think it is probably <20, including birds, whales, seals and the odd jellyfish. Have seen quite a few more species that live inside in the aquarium.
• Longest time spent trying to get a website to load: about three days (this website, in fact)
• Highest point reached: 11,500 feet (in a Twin Otter, with pilot Ian, not including the higher-altitude Dash-7 flight on the way in)
• Highest point stood on: probably Sky-Blu, at 1369m (the edge of the high Antarctic Plateau) , or the top of Mt Ditte on Adelaide Island, which I climbed during the winter, and is roughly the same height.

One final fact takes a little more explanation. Rothera Base is split in half by the runway, which is in constant use during the summer. Therefore, whenever anybody wants to cross the runway in a vehicle, they have to radio the tower for permission. We reply with a CAA-approved response which is used on airfields the world over: ‘No known traffic’. I feel like I have said this an infinite number of times since arriving here, but the real figure is probably more like 2-3 million. So many, in fact that I decided to write a song about it.

This one is called ‘No Known Traffic’ – click here to download

It just remains to say thank you. Thanks to BAS for letting me come down to this amazing place. Thanks to friends and family for keeping in touch and not forgetting me. Thanks to everyone who read my blog and sent your comments. A massive thank you to everyone who has worked at Rothera over the last 18 months and made it an awesome place to be, but an especially big thank-you to the 17 other members of the winter team, who made the long, dark days fly by.

I leave you with one of my favourite quotations, from Mark Twain:

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Time is ticking away…

The clock is ticking for my departure from Antarctica.

In 5 days time, I will climb aboard the Dash-7 to begin the flight across the Drake’s Passage to Punta Arenas, along with a handful of others from my outgoing wintering team. I will be very sad to leave!

Of course, I can’t wait to catch up with friends and family back in the UK, but this has been my home for the last 18 months, a strange, challenging, beautiful home that I’ve shared with interesting, adventurous and (mostly) highly entertaining people.

In the finest musical tradition, I wrote a song about leaving Rothera.

Click here to listen to ‘Rothera (time is ticking away…)’   (Hint – if you were born before 1978 and are not into your trance/tin-whistle fusion then you may not be a fan).

Keep an eye out for my final Antarctic blog entry, to come in a few short days!

Penguins

Eighteen months on, and we still can’t get enough of the penguins which waddle around Rothera. Here are a few of them…

Grumpy-looking Adelie penguin.

Curious Adelie penguin, and Chris, one of our chefs.

Emperor penguin colony, seen from the air as we overflew them a few weeks ago.

Our own little Adelie penguin colony.

Showing off.

Comms team

With the season rapidly drawing to a close, it is high time that I sorted out the 2012-13 Rothera comms team photo. There are 6 of us in the team:

• Me (the outgoing comms manager)
• Tom Comms (the incoming comms manager)
• Karen and Crispin (the two BAS summer radio operators)
• Navy Rob and Navy Tom (the two trainee Navy pilots who are on loan as radio operators)

Here are a couple of the shots of us (yes, I’m the hairy one):

Comms team 2013, from left to right: Me, Navy Tom, Navy Rob, Karen, Crispin, Tom Comms.

…and another.

…and another.

 

Humpback whales

First things first – apologies for the recent lack of blogs. For a couple of weeks now it’s been almost impossible to get onto the website that I use. It seems to get upset with our grindingly slow internet connection, which is currently creaking at the seams due to the enormous number of people on the base at the moment.

Anyway, we had a bit of a whale week last week – minkes, humpbacks and orca all in the space of a few days. They were mostly fairly fleeting glimpses, and I only managed to snap photos of the humpbacks – here they are.

A pair of humpbacks cruised past the station, following a particularly dense swarm of krill in the bay.

Spotting humpbacks – a bit of a fluke.

Everyone loves a good blowhole.

More flukes.

More whale-tail. Disappointingly, I didn’t manage to get any shots of their heads.

Trip to the Islands

Heading out to Lagoon Island on ‘Sea Rover’. Despite the blue skies and sunshine, you wouldn’t fancy your chances in that water for very long, hence the mandatory survival suits.

The Lagoon Island hut. Built in the 80s, it has got four little bunks inside, basic cooking and medical facilities and a radio. Getting marooned here wouldn’t be so bad, apart from the smelly neighbours. The peak behind the hut is Mount Gaudry, which is nearly twice the height of Ben Nevis.

Rothera is surrounded by islands. Some of them are nothing more than guano-speckled lumps of rock sticking out of the water, mere hazards to be avoided when cruising past on the boats. Others are more substantial, with beaches large enough to support their own colonies of elephant seals.

Several of these larger islands have got huts and depots on them, installed and maintained by personnel from Rothera. These provide several functions – they are places for people to go and spend a night away from base, but more importantly offer food, shelter and medical aid in the case of emergency. Several times in the past, parties travelling on the sea-ice around Rothera have had to make a break for the island depots when the sea-ice broke up around them.

One of my ‘it’s tough, but somebody’s got to do it’ annual jobs is to go and service the emergency radios on the islands. It seems daft to do a job like this when the weather is minging, so one beautiful, sunny and still day I jumped aboard ‘Sea Rover’ and we headed off to Lagoon Island. Joining me on board were Foxy and Paul, the boatmen, and Jen and Rose, the doctors, who had the equally tough responsibility of checking the medical equipment on the islands.

Lagoon Island is about 5km away and is a barren, rocky mound rising out of the Bay. Unprepossessing though it looks a from a distance, it hides a lovely little natural harbour with a gently-sloping gravel beach, complete with a neat and tidy little stilted hut built back in the ’80s. The only long-term residents are the elephant seals who cover the beach, grunting and burping as they sunbathe.

The Lagoon Island hut. It’s now the height of summer here, so most of the snow has melted.

Servicing the radio only took about half an hour, and once I’d made a few test calls back to Rothera to check that everything worked properly, we all hopped back onto the boat and headed for Anchorage Island.

Anchorage is next door to Lagoon, and is home to an old melon hut, a handful of elephant seals and a large flock of skuas. The seals opened one eye to look on lazily as we splashed ashore, but the skuas were much more affronted, dive-bombing us indignantly as we invaded their privacy. The radio at Anchorage took a bit more work to get going, but eventually I made some successful test calls and it was time to leave.

On the way back we all agreed that work days don’t really come much better than that.

Coming ashore on Anchorage Island. A hard job, but somebody has to do it.

There is work involved, honest! This is me, servicing the VHF emergency radio in the Anchorage melon hut. Thanks to Jen for the photo.

Elephant seals 1 – 0 Humans

There are some unusual logistical challenges that we face in Antarctica. In a couple of days’ time our resupply vessel, the RRS James Clark Ross, is due to dock at Rothera and spend a hectic few days unloading a year’s supply of everything from new vehicles to toilet paper. This requires careful organisation and a fully functioning road-network around the base, to allow the JCBs to deliver their trailer-loads of goods to the right buildings.

It was unfortunate, therefore, that a large elephant seal chose this week to park itself on one of the main thoroughfares across the base, and call it home.

A lone elephant seal makes itself at home on our nice warm bridge.

Elephant seals don’t go fishing very often, and this chap decided that the wooden bridge was so comfortable that he may as well declare it as his own and stay there for a few days. Anyone who approached was given the open-mouth treatment.

The open mouth treatment, which is surprisingly effective when backed up by half a tonne of seal.

With the ship’s due-date creeping ever nearer, our base management put their heads together and came up with a plan. They would ’encourage’ the seal off the bridge, then park an agricultural trailer on it (the bridge, not the seal) and surround it with fuel drums. That should be enough to prevent him from getting back on. When the ship arrived, we could just move the trailer and vehicles would be able to pass.

Trailer surrounded by seals, with drums carefully butted out of the way.

It didn’t work. A series of loud clangs in the middle of the night turned out to be the sound of an outraged elephant seal encouraging his friends to throw the drums out of the way. Incidentally, the trailer turned out to create a nice warm windbreak.

The ship still hasn’t arrived, but the elephant seals seem to be multiplying. I’ll keep you posted.