This picture was taken a month ago at Harker Glacier

Today we did a Greene run to take Kieron and Andy down to the Harker Glacier end of the Greene to drop them off. We left their boatsuits and emergency overnight kit at the North end of the Peninsula next to the hut as we are having so much snow and wind at the moment. Seeing as it wasn’t that miserable of a day we also mapped the front of the glacier as we have already done with the Lyell and Neumayer. I have put these waypoints in our EasyGPS program and based on the charts made of the area in 2001 I estimate the Neumayer has receded at a rate of 333m a year!

We left the RIBs in the water until the afternoon pick up and got Andy and Kieron from the beach next to the hut at around 3:00pm it is a 30 minute round trip. Just as we rounded the corner into the cove Matt the mechanic was halfway along the track with the JCB to Grytiviken! I know it is only conicidence but it seems to happen every time we come back from a Greene trip and we really need to get the boats out – hence JCB wars. So I called him on the radio and asked when I could have the JCB back as that is how we get the RIBs out of the water on the trailer. He said in an hour….. well in the meantime we were having gusts that would pick the water up outside the boatshed and throw it into the air – so maybe 60 – 70 knot gusts! Obviously I didn’t really want to leave the boats at the wharf when they could be inside nice and toasty put away for the afternoon.

Matt Boat mentioned ”we could use the jet boat winch and then tell him we got the whole base to pull them out of the water on the trailer!” So we used the winch which was a bit of a pain taking 4 times as long but we did learn that it worked and we got the boats out before it really started blowing.

This is a picture after we have turned the boat outside so it can be brought into the shed with the tongue ready to hook the JCB up when we launch them again it isn’t how we brought them out of the water!!