This morning there were crosswinds from the first flight. Lucky for us there is only one twin otter on base at the moment and the conditions were not good for the Dash 7 to fly. Between Danny and I we had to cover a trip to Leonie for sediment sampling, four SAR calls and a trip the girls wanted to take for some CTD testing all before lunch. It is crazy because we can only have one boat on the wharf at a time and we don’t really have enough crew to pull from. On top of this we needed to finish getting the boat packed up that is going to the falklands. This weekend Danny is on SAR so I have the weekend off and am going on a mini break. On Saturday morning he is going to train some more crew which will give us a little more choice.

The great thing about base life is that the mechs are 250 yards away so when we realised the boat on its trailer was not going to fit in the container we took the boat off and took the trailer for modifications up to the mechs. A day and half later we had a collapsable trailer! All they charge me is hugs! I know it is true the rough tough tech services guys will do anything for me if I give them a hug!

The afternoon was spent putting the remainder of the new stuff that came in on relief into inventory and I turfed all the stuff out of the boats and dried it all out. The safety gear is now in dry bags and hopefully it will stay that way. Next week I will be powerwashing the boats and then will start detailing each one and make this into a permanent thing on the calender.

The boatshed is now organised a little bit better and all the extraneous stuff has been removed – it seemed like it had become a little bit of a dumping ground for people on base! There were things from the air unit, field assistants etc. So basically Danny and I have been spring cleaning.

CTD stands for Conductivity, temperature and Depth this probe is put down to 500m two times a week at Rothera giving scientist lots of information for oceanagraphic study. See a report by the marine assistant in 05