On Saturday it was my day off SAR and of course it was miserable weather so miserable that I don’t think anyone left Everson all day! Horizontal rain that soaked you to the skin. On Sunday when it dawned with no rain even though I was on SAR it was windy and so unlikely they would fly the helos. I went for a run around Gull Lake and took 8 minutes off my last time so I was quite happy. I walked through the bar and Tommy asked if I would go with him and Chris up Duse as he hadn’t been up since he got here. Above is a picture of Tommy coming through the hole in the rock from the summit to the lower summit. Shackleton stood on the rock above his head in a picture taken by Hurley almost 100 years ago. The helos started to fly so I ran down from the summit and Tommy continued with Chris for a long walk on the plateau and the lakes area.

Today we slipped Pipit and put her in the boatshed for the weekend ready for work on monday and putting her back in the water on tuesday. Every three months we take the boats out for a bottom clean and to service the jet drives. It is a bit of a process involving the JCB and a cable and lots of belts and braces approach as is the Health and Safety culture! We can also only do it at high water which today was at 8:30am so not an unreasonable time 🙂

Pipit leaves the dock with Matt driving

I back the trailer down the slipway making sure that I have George tell me when I am 1/2 meter from the edge of the end so the trailer doesn’t end up in deep water! Then Matt follows my hand signals and drives the boat onto the trailer.

I drive the JCB up the slipway towing the jet boat while the slack in the cable (also attached to the trailer) is taken up (back up system).

Matt Boat hanging out on the bow while she comes up the slipway as there is no way down till we get him the ladder!

Finally out of the water with an enormous amount of weed on her bottom no wonder why she wasn’t getting up to speed. This is the worse the bottom has ever been since the boats came south as a result of such high temperatures. In Jan and Feb the minimum temperature never got below 0 and in Feb we averaged 7C! It took Matt and I 5 hours of power washing to remove the weed and that isn’t a perfect job either.

Global climate change has finally effected me on a personal level! I have changed the maintenance schedule to haul out once every two months in the summer now for bottom cleaning.

Before she was even in the shed Tommy was hard at work ripping out the interior panels to run some wiring for a new alarm at the outside helm station.

As you can see the alarm is nicely fitted it will allow us to know if we have an engine overheat situation etc when you are at the outside helm position coming alongside a fishing vessel etc.

Finally we pulled her into the shed to dry for the weekend before we service the jet drives, check the anchor and service the engines. Lots to do on monday morning!

Lots of little jobs today!

We took 4 people over to the Greene to look for dead rats – they came back with 8 having eaten the poison. As it was so calm in the Morraine Fjord Matt and I were able to get off the RIBs leaving Rob and Sue to hold them on the beach and we collected a lot of wreckage off the fishing vessels which continue to break up. As you can see in the above picture – lots of rope, nets, plastic parts and pieces. Also an old shoe!

Then I cleaned up the chippy shop so all the sawdust and some pieces of wood from the wrecked needed to be burnt so I had a little fire! Which was nice as it was a cold day…

At lunch there was a lack of cheese in the cheese box in the fridge so it was time to cut some off a very large wheel given to us by a cruise ship. It requires a meat saw as the wheel is frozen…

Despite no one on base being Irish the guys decided to celebrate! So Tommy used some stock marker normally reserved for the fur seals…

And Matt Holmes used some Guiness to make a chocolate cake…

Today at Doc school we learnt about how to test for blood groups and how to administer blood transfusions and what blood groups work together. This is a picture of Sam trying to squeeze blood out of Matt Boat who despite being pricked with a lancete didn’t seem to bleed very much!

After the blood is put on the test paper and mixed with water you can tell depending on the reaction which group the person is in.

A new sport here on South Georgia on Monday was going into sea caves in our RIB in order to see if their were any traces of rats and to hand bait any caves which might possibly have some. We went quickly around to Harpon in Cumberland West and baited around the hut and then worked our way over the next four hours back along the coast going in very close and at some points a few hundred feet into sea caves. It was really good fun. Photos are by Alastair and Sam the crew for the ‘expedition’.

This is the cave at Curlew Cove that the Carrs who lived here for 14 years used to house some kayaks for expeditions on that side of the Bay.

Inside a massive cave that no one new existed between the cave at Curlew and Maiviken

Throwing bait into a cave – we decided we needed sling shots!

On a very positive note the baiting of the Greene, Thatcher and Mercer Peninsulas has been done which is an incredible achievement for the rat team and means that they have completed 10% of South Georgia which is still the largest baiting in the world. Now they need to monitor for the next year to make sure they were sucessful before moving on to other parts of the island.

The green is the rat poison!

Today was Ken (cook with rat team and also ex South Georgia Government Officer) birthday so we had a BBQ on the veranda. Out came the BAS issued insulated work overalls and Ruth did a great job of making a tasty and beautifully decorated cake!

I was on Saturday cook yesterday for the first time since I have been here. Luckily it was a miserable day so I didn’t feel bad about being in the kitchen. I decided to offer a choice of menu to the 22 people. The menu was

Butternut Squash with Avacado Salsa served in avacado shell and roasted pine nuts

Garden Fresh Tomotoe soup with chives, croutons and cream

Strawberry Sorbet
Melon Sorbet

Oven baked toothfish with sticky rice and mixed peppers with courgette and carrot ribbons and a lemon sauce garnished with deep fried chives

South Amerian beef tenderloin with blue cheese skin on potatoe mash, ribbons of courgette (lime marinade) and carrots, brocolli and a red wine reduction

The navy ship gave us the beef tenderloin as a present last time they were in and it was very tender.

Served with wine from the winemaker who was on Alaska Eagle

Creme Brulee with a mixed berry sauce
Turned out to be a hard dessert to present it required making freezing so I could turn it out of the mold then when I flamed it the plate heated up too quickly and melted the brulee so I had to make a deflector to stop the heat getting to the plate quickly flaming it and then putting it in the freezer to cool to retain it’s shape!

Lemon tart with meringes and lemon honey reduction

Mixed cheese board garnished with south georgia dandelions and figs

Meringues, mint chocolates and home made brandy snaps (quite difficult to make in bulk – you can only do 4 at a time as the temperature has to be right to roll them) with coffee

I had a great time making the food and decorating the table.

South Georgia flower arrangement!

What I really need is some bigger plates so the presentation can be a bit better but all in all great fun 🙂

Ali did a great job of having people move between courses so people got to socialise a little more. Tommy was an amazing pot wash and Sue and Matt great servers. The party went on in the bar till 5am Sunday morning! Needless to say it is quiet around base today especially with so many people leaving on the ship.

There are a lot of brass poles at the Glacier that were used to measure retreat and are now just sitting on the scree about 5km hike from KEP. A few months ago we decided to bring back the metal that was up there and I decided to make some wind chimes from the poles. Here is a picture of the tubes cut to the length that Rob the BC told me to make them. He is a musician and has an ear for these things.

Today I serviced a Tilley lamp and a primus stove. BAS has been using these since they started operating in Antarctica and seeing as they still work and are easy to service why not keep them. I think I will be buying some on ebay as I really do love the hiss of the paraffin pressure stove and latern. The Primus I was servicing was made in the 1940’s and is still going strong and we have a lot of spares on base to put them back together again.

We had a successful run to the Greene and back today with Andy and Sally who we dropped off finding 5 dead rats which had died as a result of the poison. They had to really search them out but this is good news as it adds to the number that can be used in the genetics study.

This evening 4 of us are invited to the Prince Albert II a fancy cruise ship that is in for the evening. So must jump in the shower as I just ran up to Deadmans and it is so so hot here.

Breaking news – Today Kieron and Dion diving found the hopper 2-3m away from one of our shot lines. We put shot lines in yesterday when we were scanning the bottom with the sonar and this signature was the best one so the divers dove that one first. The visibility was only about a meter but they searched from the line and found it very quickly.

As you can see from the above diagram the hopper was 25 feet from the photo transit and from the video 2 transit.

After they dove Tommy and I went out on Pipit and picked up all the marker bouys except the one with the hopper on the end. After flushing the jet drives of lots of kelp we took aboard Kieron, Dion and Pat and they all hauled the line as tight as possible.

We then dragged it back (not on the bottom) to the wharf where it was craned out of the water. At 150kg it wasn’t possible to actually lift it up by hand.

Amazingly the Honda engine on it which had been submersed for a week started up fine after a hose down! Unfortunately the rest of the hopper is pretty dented up due to the collision with the water having been dropped from 150 feet. It remains to be seen if it can been used again.