This morning it was sleeting when we got up and the tops of the mountains were covered in snow. With such wet sleet I decided my morning run was going to be a 5km row on the machine in the gym instead! The snow kept up all day and when I went for my run this evening in it up to Deadmans the scree was slippery. It looked beautiful with the snow covering the hillsides.

A day for doing indoor jobs like washing the boatsuits which includes taking out the inners and putting them through the washing machine. This is a bit of a pain as the inners are zipped in and there are 22 boatsuits!

Our boatsuits are actually immersion suits very warm for here especially on a hot summery day.

After dinner (made by Katie of meatballs and pasta – very tasty) I decided to make something from the poor butternut squash that has sat in the fridge and was starting to go off so I made a stew with red peppers, garlic, onion, chilli, parlsey and some caraway seeds (that Dee gave me as part of my christmas present). Hopefully the guys will find it tasty for lunch tomorrow.

Tomorrow the Shackleton is meant to arrive with all my friends from Rothera so Friday and Saturday are set to be fun days on base catching up with everyone from my last season.

Today we had a bit of an epic day in the boatshed. Pipit the jet boat we took out on Friday had to go back in at high water today as the weather and height of tide wasn’t looking good for tomorrow or Friday. We completed the following work on Pipit since Friday (taking the weekend off obviously!).
* 6 monthly yanmar service which includes anti corrosive zinc replacement/checks and oil change (all 10 litres per engine)
* Built a bracket for the direction fiding, radar and radar reflector mast that has to be dropped down to get the boat in the shed. Up until now they were using a broom handle Matt and I didn’t like the system as it meant the engine hatches had to be left up etc.
* Pressure washed the bottom of the boat and the decks
* 100 hour service of both jet drives including anode replacement and full cleaning of parts and regreasing
* Installed exterior engine alarm at outside helm station (tommy did a beautiful job)
* Added the AIS and Iridium to the emergency comms batteries (again a tommy job)
* Created a diagram of all the fuses and circuit breakers with labels (Tommy job)
* Layout of the windlass that we are going to install

* Anchors and sea anchor out and checked cleaned and shackles wire tied
* Cleaning of bilges (Matt job)
* Re write of job descriptions and creation of tools list for the jobs
* weekly check which includes webasto heater, safety equipment, normal engine checks of fluid levels etc.
* steering system checks and hydraulic fluid checks
* painted the forward handrail on the aft side black to stop reflection of the ice light at night back into the helmsman’s eyes

So we put the boat back in on the rising tide and put Prion on the trailer and hauled her out for a two monthly jet drive/hull clean service. After seeing the state of Pipits bottom and experiencing a 4 knot drop in speed and a sluggish helm I decided 3 months was too long between haul outs so created this two monthly service. With it being a large procedure to hook up the trailer and do the haul out we will endevour to time it so the 4 monthly serviced boat goes in and the other boat comes out for its two monthly on the same tide like we did today.

Prion’s bottom was as bad as Pipits so I pressure washed one side and then started servicing the jet drives while Matt pressure washed the other side of the boat. At 2:45 we put her back in the water and took an hour and half off for lunch as we had been none stop since 9am.

It was a gray damp and dismal day but seeing as we were pressure washing it didn’t really matter that it was raining as we were going to get wet either way!

Sam took this picture this morning it is a stunning picture and just what it looked like!

And another picture by Sam as I got frustrated by my camera! This is the moon coming up tonight.

Sam took this picture of Bark Europa it came to Grytviken during horrendous weather just for the day yesterday. Matt and I went over with Andy and Robert to get their lines and tie them up to the jetty. Then it monsooned the rest of the day and Matt and I had lots of jet boat servicing to do! It was great to see an tall ship at the wharf with the whaling station as a backdrop.

More information at their website http://www.barkeuropa.com/

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!