The wind shifted to the south the other day and cleared all the brash ice out of hanger cove leaving the big bergy bits.

There is so much to do on base and not enough time to do it in!

On Saturday we have a half day of work but it seems like most people work through saturday and sunday. I did my usual 5km row on the machine in the gym in the morning. I then had a morning of training including seal watch – which means for 30 minutes before the divers go in you have to watch the area of the dive for any leopard seals. Then I took the divers out for my first go at coxing the boat and as they were at their safety stop a leopard seal surfaced behind one of the icebergs so divers were called to the surface and were quickly brought into the boat. Once we see a seal you are not able to dive for 4 hours so my morning check out dive was cancelled.

After a few hours cleaning up some things in the boatshed Adam and I went up to Vals the little ski hill. The light was pretty flat but we managed to use the skidoo to groom some of the run. We spent a few hours doing runs burning quite a bit of skidoo fuel as we would drive a skier up the hill and then drive down next to the skier.

After skiing Claire had come back from her flight as co pilot and her and I went for a run on the runway. After the first time around penguins were spotted next to the runway so we had to stop and watch five adele penguins do their thing unfortunately I didn’t have my camera – next time.

Saturday night is fancy dinner night where we have table cloths and wine. As I don’t drink I had Ribena which there is plenty of on base. The chef makes a three course meal which was really good. We had fruit salad for starters followed by fish stew and NZ green lipped mussels, brocolli and mash. For dessert we had a cheese cake in filo pastry with strawberries on top. Lee the chef is really doing a great job with frozen and canned food!

The sun doesn’t set at the moment so between midnight and two you have twilight seen in the above picture.