Mother and pup on the track to Grytviken – this pup is 2 months old the ones we were weighing mostly don’t have puppy fluff anymore and are a lot bigger!

The last pup weighing at Maiviken was today and we are all exhausted. We left base at 8am so that the rat team could fly in the afternoon as we needed a SAR team on station. However, it is too windy for flying so we could have done it later in the day. The pups are weighed 1,2 and 3 months after peak pupping so March 7th is the last one thank goodness. They are quite mammoth at the moment the largest weighing in at 19kg. We split into teams of 4 with two catchers on each team. Our team was RAAT – Rob, Andy, Ashley and Tommy. Andy and I were the catchers with Tommy getting the nerve up to catch 2 in the tussock. Each team was to catch 25 on the beach and 25 in the tussock. So I did the first 14 and then Andy did the remaining 11 on the beach.

They were very bitey and both of us have love bites to attest to the job (the above is on my arm). We went straight into the next 25 with me doing another 13 and Andy finishing off our 25. We had a bit of a break and the other 4 still had 20 to do so we helped out and did 10 more of theirs in the tussock. With Tommy catching 2 and Andy and I each doing another 4. I fell in a few smelly seal wallows and generally got battered so am looking for an easy afternoon at the desk. It is too windy to do the sonar work at the moment. Cloths are in the wash! We realised that only Alastair and I had done all three weighing sessions – enough for another year that is for sure!

The rat team finished the Greene on Friday and despite a miserable forecast for today it was one of the most beautiful days we have had. I was in shorts and t-shirt pretty much all day. Tommy and I picked up Andy and Alastair from the Greene where they had been looking for dead rats and removing the last of the bait boxes.

The rat team tested the hook on TC (helicopter that dropped the hopper) with a bit of steel and decided it was OK to put on the spare hopper.

The Thatcher was started and next we knew we heard pellets hitting the roof! As you can see above in the picture they are quite large pieces of bait. After they ‘painted’the Bore Valley (where we get our water) a team went up and removed the bait away from the stream and from within the stream. They have proven that we wont get sick from it but still are removing the pellets as a precaution.

So onto tomorrow which is a busy day with the last of the seal pup weighing and sonar search for the hopper.

This is a picture of helicopter AM with the bait spreading hopper attached. The bait sprays out of it spreading at a rate of 53 pellets per 20m square. The pilots have to be incredibly skilled in flying their grid patterns to ensure complete coverage of the ground.

The Hopped on TC last week came off while over King Edward Cove. The emergency release was set too sensitive (at least that is what they think) and off it fell. Since then I have spent quite a few hours trying to figure out a search area for diving. Collecting together all the information we have a 180 foot by 95 foot area and I have made concrete weights so we can put shot lines down in the four corners of the search area. Tomorrow monday we will first do a sonar search in the area to see if we can identify it that way.

I was able to create the search area using the following information.

1) Photos taken by Pat from his kitchen that show it floating before it sank. He took three photos a minute apart. Then he corrected the camera time to GMT by taking a picture of a GPS with GMT time on it. From that we were able to figure out the rate and direction of drift on the surface and we know that it sank before 22 minutes past the hour as that is when the helicopter was back on the pad at Grytviken. We took the co-ordinates of where he took the photos from and plugged them into GPS program. Next I took a transparant film and drew out the relevant landmarks so I could line them up with the shore on the otherside of the cove. I ran around the cove until I was in line with the position of the bucket when the last photo was taken and took a GPS position. We used these two positions for our first transit.

Photo by Pat of the helicopter over the hopper just before it went down.

2) The second transit taken from the photos was found by dead reckoning the maximum drift before it sank. This time Sam ran around with the GPS and I told her right and left a bit until she lined up correctly with the estimated position. This position was then put in the program.

Transparacy to site through with dead reckoning positions

3) Luckily the GEO camera crew had video footage of the helicopter hovering in the two positions after losing the hopper and these were about 90 degrees from the photos. So they found the footage and we took a GPS position of where they had been filming from. We then took a photo of their two sections of video on pause. I biked around to the position that they had filmed at and took two compass bearings to find the position of the first and second hover.

4) The helicopter had a GPS aboard however, there wasn’t a button to press to save a position however, the pilot radioed it back to the pad. That position was on land so we had to create an offset. When the helicopter was sitting stationary on the pad we had the position from the tracking device and the helicopter GPS position with some simple maths we had an offset. This created another point on the search chart.

5) When the helicopter was stationary we took a position of it on the pad and plotted that. Then we entered into the helicopter GPS the position that the pilot read out and it gave us a range and bearing to it from the helicopter. I put this as another transit into the GPS program.

6) We had the position of the jet boat when we called off the search and also the position of the two dives that were attempted so yet more information to add.

7) We had the two hover positions from the helicopter tracker. The helicopter hovered once over it while it was moving and then moved away to allow us in the jet boat to approach so it had to move away.

8) The last bit of information was to get the pilot to fly back to the position on his GPS and throw out of the window a weighed shot line with a bouy on the end. We then went and took GPS co-odinates of it and put that in the mix. This ended up in the center of one of the search area boxes so we will probably start with that box first if the sonar comes up with something of interest.

So lots of information on the chart. This week will show us whether the information is useful and if so we will have the hopper back on dry land. Quite an interesting bit of detective work 🙂

End result…

The rat team to use the light effectively are on GMT time so this was the only place in the world that had a two hour time difference between two buildings 100 feet apart! We decided as a base to move to GMT so last night we lost two hours of sleep. Lots of tired people today!

Today I spent the day doing detective work using the photos and a bunch of different bits of information to create a better search area to recover the hopper hopefully next week when we have a dive compressor and more dive kit arriving.

We also filled a lot of sandbags with cement and shored up the slipway at low water as wave action has eroded it quite severly. An old boatman removed a lot of material from the beach because they wanted to tie the RIBs up this has caused quite a large issue.

So that is my update…. everything from now till the rat team leave will be basically around base as I am on continuous SAR duty so aren’t allowed more than 10 minutes from base.

A REALLY search and rescue. The helicopter didn’t fall out of the sky luckily but the expensive bait hopper came off the hook and fell into the sea. We were having lunch when we were scrambled to the boats. Tommy, Alastair and I jumped into a jet boat along with Kieron the government officer and we took off to where the helicopter was hovering over the hopper.

The hopper on the ground in the hanger not in the sea where it is now!
By the time the helicopter moved away so I could go to the location it sunk 30 seconds before we arrived. We didn’t see it actually sink but fortunately pictures were taken by Pat from his kitchen so from that picture we were able to get a transit and therefore a possible location.

We put together a dive team of Kieron, Martin (the head of South Georgia government), Katie and myself and headed out on a RIB.

The film crew jumped on Wanderer and started filming the whole operation. With 1m visibility we were not able to find in on a tank of air so we returned to base to leave off the dive team. We then headed to the Greene to pick up Andy and Sally who had been camping there for the night to watch what effect if any the helicopter baiting had on the wildlife and also to collect more rats from the traps. By the time we were back it was 6:30pm.

A rat in one of the bait boxes I made from the Greene photo by Sam

We had a search and rescue exercise with the rat eradication team where we had to launch our boats to the site of a downed helicopter. We had the RIB in the water 7 minutes after the call to muster and were on site 16 minutes from the call. The site was 5km away so not a bad response at all. I was very proud of the team on base.

Dotty ‘towing’ the RIB!

How many boys are needed to flush an engine!?

It was a stunning day so Tommy and Alastair asked if they could go out on Dotty our very small boat with a 3.5hp engine on it. They had a lot of fun as you can see from the pictures – bunch of kids. The NG Explorer came in for the night so we ended up aboard for drinks and pizza with rocket. They gave us some bannannas which were very tasty as well.

Picture by Alastair Wilson

Alaska Eagle came back in on Saturday night so I promised to take them for a walk on Sunday. With the
forecast looking bad we went for the nature tour of Maiviken beaches vs the peaks.

We were over taken by Rob doing the half marathon with Hugh as his trainer. Rob got a great time of 2 hours 3 minutes. Shame he was sick on the actual day as it would have been a fight to the finish with Theis.

Pictures by Brad Avery

Down at Evans Lake they enjoyed being surrounded by curious fur seal pups. Then onto the gentoo colony which has abandoned the hills where they nested for the area around the lakes a little bit closer to the sea. Next stop was the hillock over the lake to see if the sooty albatrosses were still in residence unfortunately they were not. So down to Tortula to check in on the beach which has really emptied out in the last month. The penguins are now able to wonder around the beaches without falling over fur seals! From there we hiked over the chest high tussock to Burnet before heading back completing the circle to the hut.

At the hut I fired up the primus and they all enjoyed a cuppa just as the rain started. We came back via the waterfall just before Deadmans hiking up it to the plateau and then descending back into Bore Valley the Grytviken side of Deadmans as it was starting to blow horizontal rain. By the time we were back at the boat we were all wet! It was gusting 60 knots and the sea was whipped up with spindrift the yachts were heeling over in the wind. On Sunday night it got up to 80 knots with averages of 45 knots for long periods.

On base we tucked into an unhealthy fry up and watched the movie the Kings Speech which was very good.

Click here for Alaska Eagles report

Yesterday was a day full of boating and cooking. We picked up the happy campers and dropped off Katie, Tommy and Matt H for their holidays. We also dropped off three people to work the rat boxes at the Greene. Then it was back to station to do scrub out, some RIB repairs, start making 20 more rat bait boxes and cook. I made boneless lamb loin marinaded in oregano, pepper, chilli flakes cooked to medium rare and then glazed with a balsalmic, garlic, red wine reduction. Served with mixed veg, creamed spinach and basmati rice. This was followed by sponge cake (chocolate chip or cherry) with custard.

Today it was a stunning day with flat calm, blue skis and no wind that changed around 1pm but we had already been out to Brown Mountain.

The scree going up Brown….
Alastair, Andy and Sam went ahead I then ran to meet them at hydro dam we walked up to the summit of Brown and took many pictures before I continued on the marathon route running while they headed down the way we came up.

The way down at the end – 1/2 marathon route

I got to the lake before them so went for a swim which they joined me in. A tad chilly but also oddly refreshing.

Back to base for midday for a photo shoot. Matt Boat wanted us to get dressed in Orange in support of indepdent lifeboats in the UK. So I sprayed orange paint in my hair! Don’t worry it washed out afterwards.

The wind got up so instead of heading to Maiviken I spent the afternoon in the chippy shop finishing rat boxes and starting my second wind chime made from glacier poles (more later on that) and did a little more RIB repair. I am procrastinating as I need to do my tax return but cant really face it!

Sam is in the kitchen with Alastair making a Thai feast for saturday night dinner of fishcakes for starters than green curry, crispy beef etc. 25 for dinner tonight so I might go and see what I can do to help out.

Yesterday morning we had a 5 hour boating trip which was great fun. Starting with the endless rat boxes at Greene then Maiviken, then we picked up a rusted drum off the beach, followed by dropping off Hugh and Andy at Harpon.

Hugh made a new door for the hut at Harpon so while he fitted it we went over to the Neymeuer Glacier ice cliffs.

Using the radar I kept us 1/4 mile off the cliff and plotted it as a track on the GPS. It has been found that this glacier is receding at a rate of 1 meter per day! That is an incredible rate of collapse of a large and beautiful glacier.

While we were doing the mapping Tommy spotted a Lep pulled out on a bergy bit.

We went back to Harpon and picked up the tools and boatsuits from the Harpon party and waved at the two people summiting 3320 before heading back to base. Sue asked us to grab some kelp for making kelp crisps – not sure how they will taste! Odds and ends to do back at base including trying to repair the sponson still on Luna so that it will hold air for a reasonable amount of time. I had dinner over at the museum and watched a movie about whales which one of the visiting yachties had made.