Frozen Sea

Panoramic view of the sea ice around Rothera, taken from Reptile Ridge

Finally, after weeks of 'warm' (up to +3 degrees C) and windy weather it's starting to get a little more wintery. With the calm weather and temperatures dropping to -17 the sea ice has started to form. This week the ice in the local area was finally thick enough to allow travel so Birgit and I headed out to cut some holes and deploy some traps in a bid to collect some marine life for us to study.

Matt making light work of chainsawing through the 40cm thick ice in Hangar Cove

GAs & willing volunteers heading out to test the thickness of the sea ice further off base

Freeing the ice blocks
Hauling the ice blocks from the holes

After 5 days of clearig the holes of new ice and checking traps daily our catch totals a rather disappointing single Parbolasia worm.

A delightful Parbolasia. They're around 50cm long and very slimy! They are scavengers and will eat anything, apparently one was once caught in Hangar Cove which had ingested an empty Spam tin!

Sunshine straight from the fridge!

North end of Stork Ridge. The route is to the right of centre

Dan (GA) and I headed out to climb a route on Stork North today. Climbing routes often get bizarre names which are highly meaningful to those who named them but usually leave others a bit bewildered - as in this case where the route is named 'straight from the fridge', sadly I have no idea why. It was a mixed route - meaning partly snow / ice and partly rock. Rock climbing whilst wearing large boots, crampons & gloves and weilding ice axes is "interesting".

Me leading up the easy bit!

On reaching the top we were rewarded with a very special sight - our first view of the sun since it disappeared behind the horizon nearly 2 months ago.

Crevasse Exploring

Some photos from a stunning local crevasse which Rob, Dan and I went to explore:

Dan setting up the anchors to enable us to abseil down into the crevasse (photo by Rob Webster)

We abseiled 20m down to a fairly wide snow bridge then descended another 10m on foot whilst the walls of the crevasse narrowed, just allowing us to get through.

My crevasse pose (photo by Rob Webster)

At the entrance the walls supported strange mushroom-like snow formations.

(photo by Rob Webster)

Rob admiring the icicles which made amazing sounds when chimed.

As we got to the end of our rope (meaning this was as far as we could go.. for today) it was getting fairly narrow and the walls were perfectly smooth.

(photo by Rob Webster)

Jumaring back out wasn't quite as much fun (it involves hauling yourself up the rope with the aid of 'Jumars', these can be moved up the rope and grip it when they are loaded, there's also a sling attached to one of them in which you put your foot. So it's a case of standing up in the sling then quickly moving the top jumar up as high as you can, bending your knee and moving the lower jumar & leg loop up and repeating process this lots and lots and lots of times)

Rob the Wood Bender

Many people give themselves projects to do over winter, most choose to learn a new skill - learning to play an instrument or perhaps improving on languages but Rob has gone one step further and given himself the incredible challenge of building a guitar. He has spent many hours in the chippy shop over the past few months showing incredible patience as he painstakingly sands away millimetres of wood to create the perfect curves and thicknesses required.

Today was rather exciting as he reached the part where he had to bend the pieces of wood for the side of the guitar. This involved soaking the wood for a few minutes before bending over a heated pipe. Pretty impressive stuff....

More photos and information on the progress of Rob's guitar making can be found on his blog http://www.robertwebster.org/blog.html

Medieval Banquet

We normally make a bit of an effort for Saturday night meals, this week we decided to do something a bit different and have a medieval banquet. There was the the usual Saturday morning rush to make costumes and decorations with outstanding results.

Some of the decorations including an amazing candle holder that Al 'just knocked up'

Ferg and Matty partake in a spot of post-banquet jousting

Posing for a photo around the bar which most definately isn't in the 'lounge'

Snow & Ice

There has been quite a bit of snowfall over the last week and some impressive drifts are forming around the buildings on base... Notice the position of the sun, this photo was taken around midday and at this time of year the sun is remaining really low in the sky, we're currently loosing around 7 minutes of daylight each day. It starts to get light around 10am and is dark again soon after 5pm. It also appears to be rather shy lately - often opting to hide behind the clouds.

Typically the windscoops form around the buildigs that we don't use in winter whilst elsewhere doorways, windows and pathways get drifted in and require daily digging.

I took a long overdue walk around Rothera Point this morning (it's been nearly a month since I last went round. It's a great walk, taking anything from 30 minutes to 2 hours depending on how distracted you get by the wildlife and scenery). The light was far from ideal for photograpy but you get an idea of what the snow / ice is like at the moment.

As the sea temperature cools ice begins to form on the rocks. After last years' poor show we're keeping our fingers crossed for some decent sea ice this year. The surface of the sea begins to freeze once water temperatures reach -1.9 degrees C

It's best to let sleeping furries (Fur seals) lie - they're grumpy and very smelly. There are still a lot of them about (over 60 today) along with a few Crabeater seals, Elephant seals, snow petrels and gulls.

This is an impressive arched berg currently sat in North Cove, the large cloud was full of snow which descended on me seconds later.

Winter Trip

Initial plans of travelling through McCallums Pass to the other side of the island were scuppered by large amounts of snow making travelling conditions poor. James (my GA) and I decided (along with the 4 other winter trippers - Adam, Tim, Dan & Birgit) to travel to a popular campsite near Trident, just 30min skidoo drive from base. The 'short drive' ended up taking 2 hours as poor snow conditions meant that we had to double-head the sledges (using 2 skidoos to pull one sledge). On winter trips we have to take a skidoo each and 2 sledges - one the 'living unit' laden with the pyramid tent, fuel, boxes of kit (stove, tilley lamp, food), 'p-bags' (the BAS sleeping system of a camping mat, sheepskin, down sleeping bag etc), climbing gear and personal kit and the second the 'half-unit' which is mostly emergency equipment - a 'pup tent' (small 2-man tent), spare clothing & 'p-bags', fuel, 1st aid box etc... this is required incase the 1st sledge happens to disappear down a crevasse. There's no such thing as 'travelling light' down here! The whole setup is linked together with ropes so that when travelling the order is GA on front skidoo (as they generally know where they're going), linked to a sledge, which is linked to the front of the 2nd skidoo which is also towing a sledge. The tricky part is moving together so that the 2nd doo doesn't run over the rope. 1 Antarctic Campsite (3 x 2-man pyramid tents; 1 x 3-man pyramid tent [a bit of a luxury, we took this as a 'party tent' since it's a bit difficult to sqeeze 6 people into a 2-man for evening drinks and the radio sched with base]; 1 x old pup tent converted into 'toilet tent'; 6 skidoos; 6 sledges; lots of flags for marking anything that's likely to get buried in snow).

Wednesday brought poor contrast, wind and snow meaning it was unsafe to travel (as you can't see the crevasses). We occupied ourselves by attempting to build an igloo complete with tunnel-entrance. Sadly we didn't get it finished before dark (which is around 5pm these days).

Thursday was slightly more promising and allowed us to get over to and climb on a local nunatak (top of a mountain peeking through a glacier) called N26. James and I opted for a rather nice snow gulley around the back (with a not so nice walk-in through the deep snow).

Walk into the climb (we went up the wide gulley left of centre)

The snow was good and the slope not too steep so we managed to do the whole route moving together (meaning we didn't have to stop to place protection / belay one another)

View from the top - looking towards Gwendolyn & McCallums Pass

Thursday evening brought strong winds and LOTS of snow, about a metre of it. It made walking around camp rather difficult and we generally opted for crawling about as it was easier! The high winds and blowing snow made things rather unpleasant and so much of the day was spent indoors reading and playing cards.

The weather improved slightly on Saturday and after digging ourselves OUT of the tent (the door had drifted in overnight which was rather worrying) we spent four hours digging out the sledges and skidoos and attempting to move them. The snow was so soft that moving the sledges was impossibe without the doos digging themselves in and getting stuck.

There's a skidoo under there somewhere...

.. and the half unit sledge is about to disappear

Several hours of digging later - doos and sledges are returned to the surface

It took another 2 days for the snow to firm up enough to allow us to travel back home, during which time winds got up to 30-40 knots and more snow fell. Fortunatley we'd brought enough books, games and port. It took us 2 hours to dig out the tent and guy ropes which were fairly buried by this time.

Home sweet home - looking a little sorry for itself (as were we after all that digging)

Despite the digging it was great to be back under canvas and off base for a while, you can't beat camping in a big orange tent in the snow.