On Monday at our 9am radio sched we called in a SAR exercise. Rob made me the casualty I was apparently skiing when I broken my leg just above my ski boot and had a head injury. He gave KEP comms our location and details and left it to everyone on base to then come and rescue me with the equipment which we have been making and testing over the last few months. I hasten to add I was not injured it was just an exercise. As the two boats were out at the time attempting to take Pat and Sarah on holidays they pretended not to have received the call until 10:30 when they got back. Meanwhile Rob Tommy and I finished making our breakfast then I did a little hut maintenance before we headed to Sorling Beach where we would be picked up. It was snowing lightly and the contrast was not great however, the boys went to the Ellerbeck Ridge where the skiing had been so good on Sunday and had a play. Meanwhile as I felt jinxed I sat with the bags and read my book. When we knew the SAR team was headed our way we skinned to the ‘accident site’ and pretended we had only day bags.

We proceeded to make a shelter with what we had in our bags. We dug into the snow making a level platform using the hill side as one wall, the two side walls we built up with snow and then using our avalanche poles and skis we made a roof. The skis were held up by the snow on the hill and ski poles at the front and then the skins were used to keep the bivy bag roof in place. Some large blocks of snow were used to fill in between the ski poles and viola we had a shelter.

We saved two ski poles to act as a splint on my leg and I sat in the shelter out of the falling snow in the relative warm with my book!

Eventually the team showed up hauling the medical pulk and casualty pulk. They remove the shelter from around me and then loaded me into the pulk attached to the spinal board. Then I was pulled back to the shoreline it was a very comfortable ride.

This is all the SAR kit in biosecurity building when we eventually made it back to base as you can see it looks like we are moving house! All in all it was a very successful SAR