Helicopter Ops

There was ice and snow all over the boat this morning some of it was quite spectacular. This is an icicle attached to the life raft.
The helicopters are flying to Casey. It is something like 60 nautical miles and is about 1.5 hours round tip. They are carrying gear and people in and out. It is a huge operation. Everyone involved is very busy and frantic. Those that aren't really involved are bored out of their minds. We are not moving, so there is no new ice to look at and no chance of seeing any wildlife unless it is silly enough to come up to the ship (now often referred to as BOB=Big Orange Boat) to see what is going on. We have 3 helicopters on board, two squirrels that will stay with us at Davis for the summer and a big S76 that is going to go home on the ship.
For those of you that aren't helicopter geeks, this is what an S76 looks like:
and this is a squirrel:

Boredom

Sitting on the boat can be quite boring. I have my email set-up on board now. It gets sent/recieved via a satellite link-up three times a day and we are limited to 30KBytes per message. I have actually done some work while on board the Aurora, that is how bored I was getting. Wrote some code that seemed to impress my boss, but suspect it is full of bugs as my head is still a bit groggy and I didn't really have any ability to thoroughly test it. Got an email from my boss indicating that the guy I am replacing (lets call him Dave) had slipped and badly sprained an ankle, which meant that he might not be available for field work for a while!
The ship is totally surrounded by near solid ice as far as the eye can see. Here is a (>180 degree) panorama of the ice from the side of the Aurora. It is stark, beautiful and fantastic, but a little boring after a couple of days!

Bergs and Emperors

We are now almost entirely surrounded by ice, and we have seen our first bergs. The photo is one of the first bergs we came across as the sun was setting. I have been spending a lot of time on the front of the boat or in the bridge. We have seen a lot more seals and have now come really close to a few emperor penguins! I got a little excited because there was a possibility that I would get to go into Casey station to have a look at some of the equipment there, but because the boat can't get close enough most of the low priority things will be dropped off the list. The weather is looking really good for the helicopters to get going...

Ice

At last there are bits of ice floating in the water! The pancake ice really does look like pancakes! Suddenly everyone on the boat is really excited again, like they were when we first left Hobart. It is a great feeling. There are till a lot of albatross around, along with a lot of other smaller birds . It is getting colder and colder and the ice is getting thicker. We are now seeing the occasional Weddell seal ontop of the ice and it is occasionally snowing. Here's a photo from the top of the Aroura at night with snow blowing through the spotlights.

Crossing the line

As per maritime tradition, there has to be some ceremony on-board to celebrate the crossing of significant lines of latitude. In this case, it is 60 degrees south. The ceremony basically involves King Neptune, a fish and a whole lot of yoghurt, Vegemite and various other food stuffs. It is all a bit of fun, but can see why it has upset a few people in the past, (especially hearing that it used to be a lot worse!). Anyway, that is probably as much as I should say about it, but here are some pictures of some of the ceremony. The young man covered in Yoghurt is our station leader at Davis this year!

More of the Southern Ocean

It turns out the southern ocean isn't all bad. Appart from an unusual lack of ice-bergs (we haven't seen one yet!) The southern ocean is now as calm as it ever gets! Here's a picture of two of the Davis carpenters sunning themselves on the Helideck. There are plenty of birds flying about the place generally making it difficult for us to get photos of them, but at least it passes some of the time. The weather is amazing! Sunny and warm.

The Aroura Australis

The ship, not the phenomena!

I have to stop calling the ship a boat or the crew will get angry and refuse to feed me any of the fantastic food on board! Here's a view from the Helipad on the back of the ship as we steamed out of Hobart. The first night on the boat was pretty good as the waters were relatively calm and everyone managed to get some sleep after a few frantic weeks of saying goodbyes and organising their affairs. It wasn't long however before the boat started to rock and several people spent a lot of time in their bunks. I was a bit queezy and went off my food or a while, but held up better than I thought I might (those little pills the doctor gave us were great, but they really put you to sleep). So spent the it few days dosed up on drugs slowly getting used to the swell and not getting uot of my bed much. Eventually I got outside and got some pics of the boat rocking around, but I missed getting shots of the really bad stuff. The one shown here is of Dave (who is heading to Mawson) on the heli-deck coping with the roll!

Goodbyes

The boat left Hobart on the Saturday, 20th of October. Sam arrived on the Friday and checked into the hotel where we would spend our last night together for 15 months. Here is the last picture I got of us together. I met her after finishing up at the division ad dropped my gear off too, before heading to a pub to meet a lot of the other expeditioners and introduce Sam to the people I would be spending a lot of time with in the near future. It was a great night, and a fair bit of alcohol was consumed. Eventually we snuck away and had a lovely tea in a Fish Cafe thing (Mures) before retiring for the evening.
The next day I had briefings from early in the morning. I had to run through Hobart to get back to my usual accommodation to pick up all my gear ready for loading onto the boat. I just made it! My Mum and Sam's Mum flew into Hobart on the Saturday morning, sorted out their rooms and headed (with Sam) to the Salamanca markets where I met them around lunchtime. We were all a bit tired and not real keen to do anything in particular so we wandered around the markets for a bit. We had 4 more hours than I had expected as the ship's departure was delayed to 8pm for technical reasons. Eventually we end up at Mures again for tea, which was a lot busier than it had been the previous evening! We barely had time to eat our meals before I had to be back at the boat.
The final goodbyes were hard, but all the girls were very good and I don't think anyone shed a tear on the night except me (just one or two). It was great to leave on such a high note with everyone happy, and great to finally be on my way south!

Last week at Antarctic Division HQ

Not really sure why the antarctic division get us back to do more training the week before departure. Everyone was so excited and bustling that I don't think much of the final training sunk in. Most of it was revision of what we had been through previously. Especially for some of the winterers that had been training at the division for months (some of the summerers only get three weeks at the division before departure).
I guess the highlight of the final week was a bit of light SAR (search and rescue) training for the winterers. Basically this involved an abseil and a rescue exercise on the coast at Blackman's Bay. For those who had abseiled before it was a pretty nice day out, but for some of the less adventurous types it was pretty hair-raising!
Here's a picture of one of the Diesel Mechanics wondering what he has got himself in for!
Not long before we are off now...

A week at home

Us winterers are lucky enough to get a week off prior to departure to spend with friends and family. I headed back to Adelaide, and managed to spend a lot of quality time with my lovely wife. We managed to sort a few more things out with regard to packing everything into storage and getting the house sorted out. Sam (my wife) is going snowboarding in Canada while I am away, so there was lots of stuff to sort out. It was very dificult to find a balance between getting stuff done ready for us to go way and spending quality time together. I think we managed a pretty good compromise.
Sam had secretly arranged for us to stay in a Hotel the first few nights back in Adelaide as a Birthday present (it was my Birthday while I was home too!). It was a fatastic idea and we had a great couple of evenings together (Sam still had to work during the day).
I also managed to visit my grandparents before heading off, which was great!
On my last night in Adelaide I had a bit of a going away bash! It was a really great night, and my family put a lot of effort into organising it. It was good to talk to friends and family one last time before heading off. I am really glad so many people came along. I got to show off my Antarctic survival gear to everyone. Here's a picture of my wife with all the gear on!
It was great to have time to say goodbye to most of my family. By saying goodbye to so many people a week before I actual get on the boat, it split up some of the pain of leaving. It wont be until the boat is pulling away from the wharf that I will have to say goodbye to Sam, Sam's Mum and my Mum who are all coming down to Hobart see me off!

Cargo Cut-off

Cargo for our voyage (the second trip of the Aurora Australis for the season - V2 for short) had to be all sorted by October 4, ready for he ship to leave on October 20. It was a bit of a stress packing my entire life into a cubic metre of cargo space. So prior to the ship going I was living out of a backpack comprising the 30kg of stuff we were allowed to take on board with us. Everything was chucked in the back of utes and vans at the various accommodations that had been provided by the antarctic division, and was taken down to the wharf, where it was all weighed and logged into the electronic consignment tracking system. Here's a pic of my stuff (4 plastic crates and a couple of cardboard boxes) on the ute. Hopefully they will magically appear in my room once we are on station. With so much stuff heading down, it is remarkable that everything got there. It was a exciting experience as it meant that we were getting very close to going. I was also looking forward (in some ways at least) to spending a week of quality time with family and friends before heading away.

Finally!

I know am finally on the Antarctic Continent (YAY!) and have a bit of time to scratch myself and start catching up on blog entries! I will try and keep things in chronological order to make things easy to follow, so it might be a while before I catch up with what is going on in the present. I apologise (it seems to be becoming a habit in this blog), but otherwise things might not make sense ...