Gardner Walk

While the sea-ice is in, it is only a 3km walk from Davis to Gardner Island, where there is a large Adelie penguin rookery. We were allowed to head out there, provided we took someone ho was field trained with us. So one morning a small group of us cornered our field training officer and got him to take us out there. It was fantastic. The sea ice is pretty weird to walk on and very slippery in places, but at a measured thickness of 1.5 metres it was pretty much bomb proof! We got to Gardner with few worries. Our group comprised Martin (Met. Tech), Tim (Field Training Officer), Bri (Met Forecaster), Kane (Chippy), Spence (Plumber) and Myself. Once we got out there we started photographing the penguins as they came up to us. Eventually we all were quietly laying on the snow and were pretty much surrounded by the curious little birds. They seem almost fearless. They are keen to get within about a metre of people, but are then wary of going any further. Here's a photo of one of the birds stopping to have a look around as it passed between Martin and myself.
Basically it was great to get out and away from station to see real antarctic stuff even if it was for only three hours. The walk was good excercise and good practice at getting around on the sea-ice with and without boot-chains and ice-axes. Here's a final picture of us heading back, with a vague but discernable ice-halo forming around the sun.

Dingle Road

To give people who are not field trained (i.e. only those of us that haven't wintered at Davis in the last couple of years) an opportunity to get outside (and hence get some excercise) the station management team have allowed access to Dingle Road, so called because it heads to Dingle Lake. It goes past many of my radar (within 1km or so of station), before meandering up Heidemann Valley and turning a corner and rising a little to get to Dingle Lake. So one afternoon when we had nothing on, a group of us headed out for a walk in incredibly bright sunshine. The sunshine heated the rocks of the Vestfold Hills that surround Davis to a much higher temperature than the air, resulting in obvious heat-haze on the horizon, despite the cold.
Dingle Lake is one of the hyper-saline lakes in the Vestfolds that never freezes. It is much slatier to taste than sea water and the small mouthful I had made me feel decidedly queezy during the walk back. Anyway, it is a suprisingly picturesque walk despite the lack of vegetation and being confined to the roughly graded track. There is still enough snow around to make many of the
hills look attractive and the rocks themselves are often very clearly patterned due to their make-up or scarred by glacial action. Anyway, the picture above shows some of the rocks coverered by the salty water at the edge of the lake. And here's a picture of the people
we went with, including plumbers, carpenters, a boiler maker, a weather forecaster, a plant operator, a radio tech, a radio operator and one electronics engineer (me)!

Work Problems

On my first real day of work managed to pick up some problems with a few of the experiments. Some had been neglected for a while as Dave had been getting treatment on his leg and would be unable to do anything with them regardless. Anyway, it was a bit of a baptism of fire throughout the first month. Trying to catch up on everything that had been neglected, do some of the annual stuff that needed to be done (Dave had deliberately put-off some stuff so he could show me how to do it) and getting my first real look at a lot of the hardware I am dealing with. I know not too many people would be interested in exactly what I am working down here, so I will keep it short - Magnetic Instruments (deleting small changes and variations in the local magnetic field), Optical Instruments (looking at lot of the different weird lights that come from the sky when it is dark down here) and Radars (Lots of different types but they are all pointing upward, looking at different parts of the atmosphere. Anyway, here is a picture of one of the 33MHz meteor detection antennas that are going to be replaced this year. If you are really interested (and who wouldn't be) you can look at some of the data it produces by clicking on the "Recent Observations" link from here.

Slushie

Everyone on station takes turns being slushie. There are two slushies everyday, and they help out the chef by cleaning up some of the common areas, doing dishes and generally trying to help out. Some people complain about it, but really it isn't too hard and can be a bit of fun. There was also plenty of people not on the slushie roster who were happy to help out occasionally, which makes things run smoother. I was rostered on for the very first day of the slushie roster. I spent the morning cleaning out the bar and lounge area (called "The Wallow") paying particular attention to the coffee machine that I intend to be using on a fairly regular basis. once all he cleaning and tidying was done, I helped put out the food for lunch and after lunch, we cleared up did some dishes, ran the burnable garage up to the incinerator and had a couple of hours off before sorting out dinner. There are a lot of different attitudes towards having to do slushie duties, but I think that I actually look forward to doing something different for a day occasionally.

Saying Goodbye to BOB

For those not keeping notes BOB was the name we gave to the Aurora Australis (Big Orange Boat!). Saying goodbye to the boat was a fairly big event. The boat comes twice a year and when it slowly made it's way out of Davis Harbour, it was like waving goodbye to our only link to the rest of the world. It was a strange feeling. Happiness at finally being here and able to get into the work, but a hint of sadness at the departure of Dave and the rest of the people on the boat heading on to Mawson, or back to Hobart. Anyway, the picture is of one of my workmates deep in thought as the boat sails away. The smoke is from flares that were activated to say goodbye to the ship. It was a beautiful night, and very warm outside. Here's a photo of me (looking marginally more scruffy than I did in Australia, outside at 10pm in Antarctica waving goodbye to the ship in a T-Shirt. I am absolutely thrilled to be here, but already missing my wife and family.

Goodbye Dave

I have been told that I don't have to do any more work regarding re-supply as it is more important to get information out of Dave's head. Re-supply is going really well and I was asked if I would have had enough time with Dave if the boat left tonight (only three whole days after it arrived!). Anyway, I said hat it really wasn't long enough, but I wasn't going to expect the ship to hang round on my account, so I spent the entire day in Dave's room as people continued to pack his gear and generally say their goodbyes. I took heaps and heaps of notes and tried to record bits of it on an MP3 player. Dave gave me an absolute heap of information on a removable hard-drive and suggest that I get in quick and ask if I could move into his room (it has a much better view than mine). I was thankful that he had come out of the anesthetic without any real grogginess and was able to sped an entire day simply passing the information on. Eventually we had to call it a day, and Dave was assisted out to the heli-pad and loaded into a chopper to be carried out to the ship. He intended to wave to all the poor people that were heading out to the boat across the sea-ice in land vehicles. Here's a photo of Dave on his way! I think I'm going to be busy.

Bad News

After knocking off of my fuel line duties at 8am, I helped out unloading a couple of containers of food (mostly frozen meat and a lot of cheese that looked like it was fairly high quality stuff). Upon coming back in and having lunch, I found the personal effects had been unloaded from the boat and so began moving into my room. Not long after this, Ray (the supervising scientist pictured in my last blog) knocked on my door with a worried look on his face. I immediately assumed that the other Engineer who should have been showing me the ropes over summer was heading home. This proved to be a fair assumption, but Ray explained further that Dave (the other Engineer) was going to be put under a general anesthetic in a few hours, and have his leg set in plaster. So I had a few hours to talk to Dave and absorb as much of his wisdom as possible before he went into surgery. I was surprised that I coped so well with this news, but the prospect of doing the work of two engineers over the summer was a daunting challenge. Anyway, I had a really good chat with Dave, while other wintering expeditioners ran around us packing his stuff up ready to head back to Australia. It was quite surreal and more so considering lack of sleep had left me a little drained. I was very pleased to get a break by the time 4pm came around and Dave was whisked off into surgery, but I hoped that we wouldn't be too groggy in the morning and I would be able to get some more info out of him then when was a bit fresher!

Fuel Line

During the re-supply I was rostered on to work on the fuel line on the 4-8 shift. The first night I was on from 4pm to 8pm(not too bad), then back on the next morning from 4am to 8am (a bit worse). Never really had to do shift-work before and coupled with the fact that we were only getting about 4 hours of near-darkness, I was pretty tired at times during the process. The station has close to 1 million litres of diesel in the fuel farm, and this gets topped up during re-supply by pumping off the ship through a hose of up to 3km length into the tanks. There is a pump on the ship and a booster pump on the sea-ice, which is where I was stationed. When we started work at 4am DBT (Davis Bastard Time = GMT+7 Hours) the sun was just coming up. It was quite pretty. There were a few Adele penguins wandering around, and they weren't too sure what to make of the fuel hose! Here is photo of on of the Physicists down here who was working with me at the fuel farm (note the friendly helpers in the background!).

A beer with the winterers

The guys that have been at Davis all year, invited the new winterers into the bar at Davis on the first night we arrived. We were allowed to walk in from the ship, which was fantastic (see the pic).
The winterers had kindly moved out of the main living quarters and set in the newly commissioned Summer Accommodation Module (SAM). I think they were happy in there as it is more modern, quite comfortable and they had all put work in to getting it on line. Anyway, we were basically able to move into our new rooms straight away. It was great to have a quiet beer (for them it was probably the rowdiest beer they have had since the previous summerers had left last February). By the end of the evening I was quite excited about spending more than a year in at Davis. The bar at Davis looks fantastic! There is plenty of history around the place including a feature wall behind the bar made from a bit of the original station that was built at Davis. The bar is named Nina's after one of the Huskies that used to be an integral part of many (especially Australian) antarctic expeditions.
Met the guy who I was replacing and found that his ankle injury (originally described as a "sprain", then "worse than first thought") was now "a spiral fracture of the fibula. His ankle had gone all kinds of weird colors, but he was pretty confident he would be up and walking around in a week or so.

Finally!

The arrival at Davis was fantastic. Flares were set off and we had a great day to weave through some fantastic bergs and ram into the very solid fast ice that surrounds Davis. It took a surprisingly short time to get to Davis from Casey, due to a large number of open leads. One in particular close to Davis had been caused by a massive ice-berg (>80km long) being blown through the sea-ice and hence clearing it out of the way. It was great to see what will be my home for the next 15 months or so. I was at the very front of the boat when I first began to make out the brightly colored buildings of Davis. Here is my first pic of my new home. And here is one of the ice-bergs that welcomed us.

Melbourne Cup

The second special occasion on the boat (i.e. an occasion where we are allowed to have three beers each) was the Melbourne Cup. We all gathered around, dressed up (at least people did) and listened to a recording of the call of the race that was taken using an MP3 player to record from a HF radio. If you know anything about the operation of long range HF it is probably obvious that we had no idea who the actual winner was at the end of the call, and so had to rely on results that were emailed in over a satellite link! Anyway, it was an evening of much mirth and mayhem. It is amazing how good some of the costumes were considering the very limited resources on the ship. Here is a picture of one of the many ingenious hats/fascinators that were produced!