A tradition on Midwinter is to listen to a broadcast done by the BBC for BAS stations – see press release from BAS/BBC below. We crowded into the comms room with champagne to listen on HF at 7:30pm local time but it wasn’t that clear so Rob meanwhile downloaded from the internet and we listened again to it in the bar area.

Rob tuning in the HF to catch the broadcast

To listen to the special message compiled by the BBC click on the link below and listen out for celebrities Prof Brian Cox (06.25), Eddie Izzard (14.37) and Michael Palin (27.25).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/2011/06/110620_antarctic_midwinter_broadcast_2011.shtml

If you don’t have time to listen at the moment here’s what it says on the web page:

Produced and presented for an audience of just 43 – the brave and hardy scientists and technical staff who keep the Antarctic bases of the British Antarctic Survey running through the long, cold darkness of the polar winter – the Antarctic specials are possibly the World Service’s most unusual broadcasts.

Once a year, on 21 June, in the dark days of the southern winter, staff at the four Antarctic bases – Rothera, Halley, King Edward Point and Bird Island – cluster round their short-wave radios to hear the BBC present half an hour of music requests and special messages from their loved ones back home.

There’s special messages from surprise celebrity guests, and a selection of music that reveals a deep longing for sunshine.

This year the broadcast is presented by Martin Redfern, who was fortunate to spend a month in Antarctica three years ago, reporting on research and visiting field sites and the Rothera base.

As a result says Martin, “We feel we are talking to friends, we can imagine the scene down there and although we were only there for a few weeks in Summer, we know how food fantasies turn to salad and fresh fruit.”

Rob delivered me breakfast in bed starting with a hot chocolate with marshmallows and cream.

Followed by two perfectly made and shaped croissants

Second course on breakfast was a full cooked breakfast again delivered to my room by Rob – not a bad BC!

The midwinter presents laid out after opening – lots of talent – btw that is a musical instrument made by Rob for Tommy!

Kieron made me a half hull to scale from the architects drawings of our harbor launches.

After presents we all went for the midwinter swim!

All the Antarctic Bases will be celebrating Midwinter tomorrow and we create a photo greeting that then gets sent out to all the other bases. We have been receiving some really great ‘cards’ for the last week. Lots of excitement today with getting presents finished and because it is a holiday the weather is predictably miserable!

Tommy and I with the frozen Gull Lake below

Today a ship came in bearing fresh fruit and veg to compliment our midwinter dinner on tuesday and Tommy and I enjoyed some ski mountaineering. I also made a carrot cake and a bakewell tart as we are officially on holidays!

We worked our way up to Hodges Bowl skinning and then got to some section that were too steep to skin and both had to remove our skis/snowboard to make it to the plateau of a ridge under Narwhal. Unfortunately the lack of contrast and very hard crust with strastrugi made it hard going coming back down but we both had a ton of fun 🙂 Back in time to bio secure the fresh veg and get our mail fresh off the ship including Tommy’s belated birthday presents.

Tommy post hole digging up the slope towards Narwhal.

Due to a science cruise being brought forward we have decided to work wednesday afternoon, thursday and friday this week and postpone the activities that were meant for those days to when the two people who are going off on the cruise are back. So midwinter week will be divided over two week. Tomorrow morning we have a fishing boat in for inspection so we will be boating first thing and the rest of the day is left for people to finish off MWP. Tuesday will be a day full of activity so come back and look at the pictures if you are interested!

The building (350m2) I am standing in front of contained the engineering shop, blacksmith shop, foundry, plumber’s workshop, tinsmith shop, engineering offices and stores.

Many of the stores are still on their shelves neatly labelled and stacked (photo by Sam Crimmin). The machinery and equipment is the same as what you would find in any shops of that era – rows of metal drills, lathes, workbenches and travelling hoists. The blacksmith had a critical function as they constructed and repaird harpoons for whaling.

At present the engineer workshop has been made into a hanger and currently houses the two helicopters owned by the rat eradication team. The rotors are removed and they are all wrapped up in duvets!

As the bilges on Pipit were a little oily I forced myself to clean them out. They really should be totally clean so you can see when there is an oil leak. The water is a touch cold in the bilge between metal hulls and slush ice surrounding them!

The fendering on the wharf for ships is made of large truck/tractor tyres and is attached with chains. As you can see there was a chain on the outside of the tyre which meant it was marking up the side of ships when they were alongside. We rectified this situation as well as replacing some shackles which as you can see below were a little be worse for wear!

Matt wanted to take Dotty for a spin after sorting out the chains. Dotty is in the bottom left hand corner of the picture. She really is quite small!

While I was messing around with cleaning the bilges my cousin Natalie was getting married in Colorado Springs – Congrats Natalie wish I could have been there 🙂

I found a great book in the base library on shore whaling stations of South Georgia the other day. So over the next few months I thought I would take pictures of the buildings and explain what they were used for. I am posing in front of the Plating shop. It was part of the ship repair yard for repairing and building the cookers and boilers in the plant and for reparing the catcher boats. The machinery required for handling large iron and steel plates are now in the elements surrounded by the remained of the walls. Sheet metal roller, stamping machine, metal plating machine, metal cutter, metal drilling machine, a crane and travelling hoist. This shop also had welding facilities – cutting edge technology in the era of whaling at Grytviken.

This morning we picked up the happy holiday makers from Sorling. On the way back I was mean to Rob and put a piece of cardboard across the windscreen so he had to navigate using the radar and chartplotter. It is amazing how well the bergy bits show up on the radar. There was quite a bit of brash ice around even in the cove.

Everything is so still at the moment – last night with the full moon I did my lates without a torch it was that bright out. This morning there was a thin nilas crust on the cove which was broken up by the boats straight away. We have now turned the stop cocks to take engine cooling water out of the jet units as the slush ice was blocking the normal water intakes almost straight away.

After boating I finished off servicing one of the RIB trailers taking off the wheels and cleaning up the hubs etc.

MWP sign on Chippy Shop door – all over base at the moment!
Then I decided to sort out the workbench in the chippy shop. It has taken me since getting here to finally take action! The worktop only extended over the base by 1/2 an inch which meant you couldn’t clamp things in place on the top. I added 2 inches onto the work bench which required moving two vices etc. and there is now a large lip to clamp to. Sounds like a small project but it took me 3 hours as it is very well built.

Skins on the bottom of my skis
At lunch I skinned over to the hydro and tried to imagine what the cove looked like during whaling days. It is a hard thing to ‘see’ in your mind that this beautiful peaceful place was once full of noise, smoke and blood. Last night after watching avalanche training movies I watched a documentary called ‘The Cove’ about dolphin slaughtering in Japan. A very interesting film- it won an Academy Award in 2010.

We needed another hauling harness for our winter Search and Rescue Kit on base so everyone in our potential rescue team can haul either the medical kit or an injured person in the pulk. The harnesses are quite expensive and we wouldn’t get a new one until after the winter. Based on my hauling harness I made out of an old climbing harness I was asked to make another one for base. As would be expected my second attempt I think looks a little cleaner than my first one! I decided not to pad it as much as we are unlikely to use it in earnest.

After smoko (morning tea break!) Rob and I took Robert out to La Manche the krill fishing mother ship which has stayed at anchor off Hope Point to pick up the transshipment paperwork. Saga Sea the fishing boat left during the night having finished transferring their catch over to La Manche. Meanwhile another two krill boats are expected in this coming weekend to bunker fuel from La Manche and transfer their catch.

Over lunch time Tommy needed to do some servicing on the hyrdo electric bearings so we skinned over to Grytviken. I was slower as my ski boot was causing me some discomfort no idea why it was different from yesterday I am sure my ankle bones haven’t moved overnight! We got back in time for Doc School.

Sam’s presentation was on cold injuries and avalanche medecine. Very interesting stuff as there have been some changes in hypothermia medecine recently. We went from that to a presentation by Rob on weather as part of boat school. Rob was a meterologist for 2.5 years at Rothera so Matt suggested we have him do the weather presentation.

The lunar eclipse was meant to occur just after moonrise at 4:15 however, with the low cloud level the moon was obscured almost immediately.

After a quick 16km cycle on the bike at Carse and dinner we watched several presentations by the Canadian Avalanche center on terraine, probing, transcievers, rescue etc. So an afternoon and evening of learning.

Tuesday was a holiday in the Falklands but here we got on with work and Liberation day was celebrated with government gin and tonics on the veranda at 5:30pm. This day marks the end of the Falklands war in 1982.

I was on cook so decided to use some of the specialist flours etc I had brought with me from California. I made muffins with oat bran, wheat bran, apple sauce, oil, honey, bannannas and egg whites so quite healthy.

For dinner I decided to go with mexican so we had carna asada burritos with spanish rice and refried beans. As we don’t have any pinto beans I used some cans of 5 mexican bean salads to make the refried.

Seeing as we have a rather large amount of lemon curd I decided to make a dessert using lemon curd so made a lemon bar with crunchy topping and crust.

As it was a beautiful day Tommy and I went for a skin over to the Gull Lake track and did a run down. The snow was hard and fast still covering the scree. When I got back for some reason I decided the state of the pantry was in dire need of organisation so I spent the rest of the afternoon sorting through part used packages of lentils, polenta etc and re stacking cans etc. By the end I had a large pile of food that needed to be thrown out. Dried lamb granules with a 2003 expiry date isn’t too tempting!