This picture was taken by Rob.

The flag was at half mast here today as Wanderer III and Thies and Kicki departed South Georgia for Tristan de Cuhna and the Ascensions. They have lived here for 26 months and have been a large part of the small community at King Edward Point. They has been cruising the world for 30 years in this famous yacht.

Both talented , friendly and generous individuals who live a very simple life immersing themselves in remote places of the world. It is a sad day for everyone on base who very much enjoyed tea and cake aboard Wanderer III. Their slideshows were stunning showing us parts of the world and island that many will never visit. It was not possible to persuade them to stay unfortunately.

Kieron putting a shot line in on a promising sonar signature.

Sam and myself were on the jet boat doing the sonar search for the hopper with Robert and Kieron so we followed them out to Hope Point. The rest of the base waved from land setting off out of date flares. I must admit to having tears in my eyes. What a stunning day to leave with a beautiful sunrise and cloudless blue sky. The film crew from GEO was also on the boat and filmed the departure.

The guys ashore did the standard base mexican wave from shore and on the jet boat with the two on Wanderer replying with a two person wave! After they had dissappear from sight and stopped motoring (they only carry 20 liters of fuel) Theis got on the radio to thank us for the farewell I think Kicki was too emotional to get on the radio.

Today was Shrove Tuesday so Al and Sam made 10’s of pancakes which were a delicious after dinner treat made from eggs from the Pharos.

Mother and pup on the track to Grytviken – this pup is 2 months old the ones we were weighing mostly don’t have puppy fluff anymore and are a lot bigger!

The last pup weighing at Maiviken was today and we are all exhausted. We left base at 8am so that the rat team could fly in the afternoon as we needed a SAR team on station. However, it is too windy for flying so we could have done it later in the day. The pups are weighed 1,2 and 3 months after peak pupping so March 7th is the last one thank goodness. They are quite mammoth at the moment the largest weighing in at 19kg. We split into teams of 4 with two catchers on each team. Our team was RAAT – Rob, Andy, Ashley and Tommy. Andy and I were the catchers with Tommy getting the nerve up to catch 2 in the tussock. Each team was to catch 25 on the beach and 25 in the tussock. So I did the first 14 and then Andy did the remaining 11 on the beach.

They were very bitey and both of us have love bites to attest to the job (the above is on my arm). We went straight into the next 25 with me doing another 13 and Andy finishing off our 25. We had a bit of a break and the other 4 still had 20 to do so we helped out and did 10 more of theirs in the tussock. With Tommy catching 2 and Andy and I each doing another 4. I fell in a few smelly seal wallows and generally got battered so am looking for an easy afternoon at the desk. It is too windy to do the sonar work at the moment. Cloths are in the wash! We realised that only Alastair and I had done all three weighing sessions – enough for another year that is for sure!

The rat team finished the Greene on Friday and despite a miserable forecast for today it was one of the most beautiful days we have had. I was in shorts and t-shirt pretty much all day. Tommy and I picked up Andy and Alastair from the Greene where they had been looking for dead rats and removing the last of the bait boxes.

The rat team tested the hook on TC (helicopter that dropped the hopper) with a bit of steel and decided it was OK to put on the spare hopper.

The Thatcher was started and next we knew we heard pellets hitting the roof! As you can see above in the picture they are quite large pieces of bait. After they ‘painted’the Bore Valley (where we get our water) a team went up and removed the bait away from the stream and from within the stream. They have proven that we wont get sick from it but still are removing the pellets as a precaution.

So onto tomorrow which is a busy day with the last of the seal pup weighing and sonar search for the hopper.

This is a picture of helicopter AM with the bait spreading hopper attached. The bait sprays out of it spreading at a rate of 53 pellets per 20m square. The pilots have to be incredibly skilled in flying their grid patterns to ensure complete coverage of the ground.

The Hopped on TC last week came off while over King Edward Cove. The emergency release was set too sensitive (at least that is what they think) and off it fell. Since then I have spent quite a few hours trying to figure out a search area for diving. Collecting together all the information we have a 180 foot by 95 foot area and I have made concrete weights so we can put shot lines down in the four corners of the search area. Tomorrow monday we will first do a sonar search in the area to see if we can identify it that way.

I was able to create the search area using the following information.

1) Photos taken by Pat from his kitchen that show it floating before it sank. He took three photos a minute apart. Then he corrected the camera time to GMT by taking a picture of a GPS with GMT time on it. From that we were able to figure out the rate and direction of drift on the surface and we know that it sank before 22 minutes past the hour as that is when the helicopter was back on the pad at Grytviken. We took the co-ordinates of where he took the photos from and plugged them into GPS program. Next I took a transparant film and drew out the relevant landmarks so I could line them up with the shore on the otherside of the cove. I ran around the cove until I was in line with the position of the bucket when the last photo was taken and took a GPS position. We used these two positions for our first transit.

Photo by Pat of the helicopter over the hopper just before it went down.

2) The second transit taken from the photos was found by dead reckoning the maximum drift before it sank. This time Sam ran around with the GPS and I told her right and left a bit until she lined up correctly with the estimated position. This position was then put in the program.

Transparacy to site through with dead reckoning positions

3) Luckily the GEO camera crew had video footage of the helicopter hovering in the two positions after losing the hopper and these were about 90 degrees from the photos. So they found the footage and we took a GPS position of where they had been filming from. We then took a photo of their two sections of video on pause. I biked around to the position that they had filmed at and took two compass bearings to find the position of the first and second hover.

4) The helicopter had a GPS aboard however, there wasn’t a button to press to save a position however, the pilot radioed it back to the pad. That position was on land so we had to create an offset. When the helicopter was sitting stationary on the pad we had the position from the tracking device and the helicopter GPS position with some simple maths we had an offset. This created another point on the search chart.

5) When the helicopter was stationary we took a position of it on the pad and plotted that. Then we entered into the helicopter GPS the position that the pilot read out and it gave us a range and bearing to it from the helicopter. I put this as another transit into the GPS program.

6) We had the position of the jet boat when we called off the search and also the position of the two dives that were attempted so yet more information to add.

7) We had the two hover positions from the helicopter tracker. The helicopter hovered once over it while it was moving and then moved away to allow us in the jet boat to approach so it had to move away.

8) The last bit of information was to get the pilot to fly back to the position on his GPS and throw out of the window a weighed shot line with a bouy on the end. We then went and took GPS co-odinates of it and put that in the mix. This ended up in the center of one of the search area boxes so we will probably start with that box first if the sonar comes up with something of interest.

So lots of information on the chart. This week will show us whether the information is useful and if so we will have the hopper back on dry land. Quite an interesting bit of detective work 🙂

End result…

The rat team to use the light effectively are on GMT time so this was the only place in the world that had a two hour time difference between two buildings 100 feet apart! We decided as a base to move to GMT so last night we lost two hours of sleep. Lots of tired people today!

Today I spent the day doing detective work using the photos and a bunch of different bits of information to create a better search area to recover the hopper hopefully next week when we have a dive compressor and more dive kit arriving.

We also filled a lot of sandbags with cement and shored up the slipway at low water as wave action has eroded it quite severly. An old boatman removed a lot of material from the beach because they wanted to tie the RIBs up this has caused quite a large issue.

So that is my update…. everything from now till the rat team leave will be basically around base as I am on continuous SAR duty so aren’t allowed more than 10 minutes from base.

A REALLY search and rescue. The helicopter didn’t fall out of the sky luckily but the expensive bait hopper came off the hook and fell into the sea. We were having lunch when we were scrambled to the boats. Tommy, Alastair and I jumped into a jet boat along with Kieron the government officer and we took off to where the helicopter was hovering over the hopper.

The hopper on the ground in the hanger not in the sea where it is now!
By the time the helicopter moved away so I could go to the location it sunk 30 seconds before we arrived. We didn’t see it actually sink but fortunately pictures were taken by Pat from his kitchen so from that picture we were able to get a transit and therefore a possible location.

We put together a dive team of Kieron, Martin (the head of South Georgia government), Katie and myself and headed out on a RIB.

The film crew jumped on Wanderer and started filming the whole operation. With 1m visibility we were not able to find in on a tank of air so we returned to base to leave off the dive team. We then headed to the Greene to pick up Andy and Sally who had been camping there for the night to watch what effect if any the helicopter baiting had on the wildlife and also to collect more rats from the traps. By the time we were back it was 6:30pm.