The executive officer of South Georgia Government is down for a visit and with quite a few little jobs needing doing in Cumberland West Bay we took the opportunity to take him and Robert on a circuit of the Bay. With Sam and myself on the jet boat and Tommy and Matt on the RIB we first stopped at Maiviken. We left off Ali with the seal tagging board which I had rebuilt at Maiviken so he could also check in on the Gentoos and walk back to base. He is checking to see when they start nesting. Seeing as they don’t nest on snow though they probably won’t be nesting for a while.

Next stop was Jason Harbour which I had never fully been into. On the way across the bay the wind had picked up and the boys were bouncing around in the RIB but it calmed down later on so all was good. At Jason we went ashore and Sam left a first aid kit. She got some great pictures.

Grafitti from 1920’s onwards carved into the table in the hut.

The hut was used in the whaling days to store the post. The whalers from Grytviken side would leave the mail in the hut and the whalers from Leith and Stromness would walk over to Jason to pick it up.

A lone reindeer

Next stop was Carlita where there is a hut that needed an updated first aid kit. Richard had never seen the new hut there so was interested in seeing it. It is very plush but unfortunately so large it is hard to keep warm. BAS staff aren’t allowed on the Busen Peninsula for holidays so we have only seen the place when we have dropped off government officers for theirs.

We went onto the Neumayer Glacier as it was 8 months ago that we had done the first ice cliff mapping. As we entered the fjord we came across a very large area of massive icebergs blocking the enterance.

These bergs were grounded in 40m of water which is a underwater morraine. Either side of this morraine it was over 100m deep. We found a way through on the west side it showed up very well on the radar.

We made our way down to the ice cliff and just looking at it we could tell there had been a substantial amount of calving. When we got back to base I inputed the position of the new face onto the GPS program. Some sections of the cliff had not altered at all but others had fallen back almost .3nm. That is almost 1m per day. Also on the west side there had been a continuous ice cliff as two glacial ‘rivers’ met to form a single cliff. Due to massive calving it is now two distinct glacial rivers and ice cliffs.

We stopped in at Harpon for another first aid kit swap out and also installed a bolt on the new door and took away the old door to burn on November 5th bonfire night at base. Last stop was back at Maiviken to leave off Robert and Richard for a night at the hut there. We headed back to base – the boys were quite cold by then after 5 hours in the RIB. We had offered to change out crew but jet boats are for girls apparently… !

All pictures are by Sam.