After a delicious dinner on Wednesday at Carse House I spent Thursday working on cupboards, spreadsheets, reports and then was invited with rest of base aboard Bremen for dinner. I finished work at 5pm and headed up Duse taking 6 minutes off my time from the beginning of the week. Just enough time to jump in the shower and rush down to the wharf to go aboard.

I didn’t know it was such a fancy ship so I had not really fully dressed for the occasion. We were seated on two tables with two expedition leaders on our table and as the menus were in German we had some interesting translations. One was water with cows swimming in it! – beef broth soup in english! Seven courses later it was time to jump off the ship and head home.

I have changed to a new daily program. AM 3.75km run, lunch time lifting weights and now the load carry of 33.5kg (73.7lbs) up the side of Duse after work.

Picture showing the scree slope I am going up in the evenings!

Today it was raining and I arrived back just in time for dinner soaking wet. Needless to say this meant the scree was very slippery and I fell twice on the way down even with walking poles. however, I cut 2 minutes off my time from yesterday so it is now taking 1 hour 4 minutes to get to the plateau at the bottom of the gully and back.

I load my rucksack up with water so that when I get to the top I can empty it out and only go back down with 10kg. This is to save my knees from the impact damage.

I am quite pleased as I get done with this and don’t feel like I did anything so I am hoping this is a sign that all my training has paid off. Now the unknown is how I deal at altitude.

I was lucky to be invited to Carse House for a delightful dinner and evening. I will miss hanging out with Pat and Sarah they really are a great couple with a long history in South Georgia.

John the Dr stopped for a few hours sorting out the food store and donned his surgical top to be my dentist. BAS gave him three weeks training as a dentist and he did a wonderful job of cleaning my teeth and lecturing me about brushing to hard. So I will make a concerted effort to change the way I brush – I wonder how long that will last!

The dense fog in the morning cleared to give us stunning weather in the afternoon.

Tuesday was busy with lots of maintenance to be done. So I got stuck into servicing the lifejackets which means inflating them, checking the lights and whistles and measuring the weight of the cylinders etc. We do the service every 6 months.

Today despite the mist we decided it was a good day to head out to Stenhouse which is a peak I have wanted to climb since we got here. Only one more to go in the travel area before I have summitted all of them! Les, James, Kalinka, Rob and myself had a great walk and were given some glimpses of the wonderful view a few bits at a time. Not a hard peak to climb even though initially it looked like it was going to be.

The gully on the way down was mud/scree on a large slab which made for a fast ascent if you were not careful. As I was the last in line there was pretty much a slick surface to make my way down!

Back in time for a sauna, some buttermilk biscuits (which I was craving for some reason), a haircut and still enough time to clean my room before dinner and a movie. Only one weekend left 🙁 my departure is coming quickly. Hopefully before I leave I will get to put up the christmas ornaments at the church and make my gingerbread house to leave on base for everyone to smash on christmas day.

Hope you all had a great weekend.

I realised I had forgotten to post a picture of Tommy and I’s new roof at St Andrews and also us two at the end of a long wet day of reroofing.

This morning I had a very long conversation with my mother about our February travels in Peru that we are planning. A few more hours on the spreadsheet and then time for a walk around to Penguin River as I hadn’t been over there for a while and wanted to check out all the furry harems along the beach.

Two new furry pups napping in the sun.

Two weaners lounging in the tussock.

The beach was cluttered with pups and their mothers guarded jealously by lots of large males. In fact it was quite a spicy walk along the beach but well worth it. I diverted up into the tussock every now and again to get around a more protective male and had to jump from tussock mound to mound avoiding the smelly wet muddy elly wallows and the weaners.

Also had to be careful not to run into the lone pups who are hidden up off the beach in the tussock waiting for their mothers to come back from a four to five day fishing trip.

It was Katie Whale’s (so called as she is Katie that works at the whaling station as opposed to Katie who is the fisheries biologist and is called Katie Fish) birthday today and she wanted to have a BBQ and the party in one of the old blubber tanks.

There is one with a large hole cut in the side and the roof has been removed. It is a cool venue especially when Tommy takes the generator over and puts up the coloured lighting.

The candles were forgotten for the birthday girls cake so I jumped on the bike and headed back to base to get some. The sun was just setting and there were some beautiful clouds over base.

The South Georgia Mechs way of lighting candles!

I had the pleasant surprise of remembering that I had forgotton to put my advent calender that mum sent down out and therefore got to eat three days of chocolate.

Thursdays weather continued into Friday with 55 knots + in the Cove and yet another cruise ship finding life a little difficult for landing.

Can you tell how excited I am about the proposition of my morning run?!

I spent another day in front of the computer doing spreadsheets for my annual report. I made the mistake of asking my boss if the way that it had been presented before was how he wanted it done again. Apparently he was having to re do the numbers so we decided on a spreadsheet that would mean he wouldn’t have to re do them this year. This meant that I had to scrap the work I had done and start again – rookie mistake 🙂

I was lucky enough to get one of the spots to go aboard the old Prince Albert II for dinner which was very tasty. I was on a table with two interesting couples and the ships Dr. One couple from Brisbane Australia and the other couple from Boulder Colorado. The Dr is a fine arts studen studying in New York as well as a cruise ship Dr and was from Turkey. The meal was a delicious 5 course meal with many choices for each course. Unfortunately we were leaving at 10pm and with two minutes to go I had just ordered a chocolate cake with ice cream for dessert and had to leave it 🙁 However, the expedition leader came running after me with a plate of delicious fruit which everyone helped me gobble down as we donned our boatsuits and headed for the zodiac.

This morning we awoke to a dusting of snow on all the mountain tops.

Yesterday I was on earlies and decided to offer fish or pork for dinner with a choice of lemon drizzle cake or carrot cake. I am trying to use as much as possible all the extra goodies I brought with me in the P box. I only have one more earlies rota before I leave base for good. Time has flown by.

As I type this out the window a cruise ship is exiting the cove quickly with it’s tail between their legs with the wind they were dragging anchor and have a ton of kelp on it streaming off the bow. There are three little zodiacs following along like little ducklings!