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!).