My Birthday on an Island

My 30th was fast approaching and I was trying to decide what to do for it. The question was to stay on the base or to go away for the weekend.

Another expeditioner had their 28th birthday the day before mine and her and her partner wanted to get off station for the weekend so we decided to for a group and go to Bandits Island. Along the way we picked up another three people who also wanted to come along. Six is about the maximum number of people you can fit comfortably at Bandits Hut, a little hut on the island.

The plan was to fly out on Friday 22nd and fly back the afternoon of the 24th, however bad wind forced us to spend an extra night out.

The trip was great fun. Bandits island takes about an hour to circum-navigate, and has lots of interesting rock formations that a geologist (or rockologist  as we call them here) may be able to explain better.

The island still had ice around at, that while not safe to walk on, had lots of seals resting on it. We even had a visit from a whale along with great sunsets.

Kim the chef kindly gave us a leg of lamb and some vegies and we cooked up a roast for dinner on Saturday night.

The Davis Band

I think I may have mentioned to you in an earlier post that davis has a full compliment of band gear, and anybody who want to play is welcome to. There is a group of people on station who are all pretty good (some have even brought their own instruments along).

Last night they got together and performed for the crowds in Nina’s Bar.

It was a pretty fun night, and good to have some live music.

Even tame old Theo got up and went crazy with some stones before retiring back to the corner.

Work Work Work

Ok, well up to now you probably think that all my time down here is fun an excitement. I thought I woud et you know about two happenings that represent the more mundane aspects of work down here. Unfortunalty no glamorous photos go with this, well, unless you want to see me sitting at a computer.

The first thing that happened was that we started getting errors and outages on out satellite link. This is the link we use for all out communications to the outside world. It turned out that it was caused by somebody else transmitting on out frequency, but it took days of fault finding and troubleshooting to isolate the problem.

The second issue was that when the Aurora Australis came to vist last week, it brought not only new people and goodies, but also a computer virus. Unfortunately a lot of the embedded computers (that is computers that are built into bits of equipment, as opposed to normal computers you use for you non tetchy people) were not protected with virus scanners and it was quite a large job cleaning them all from the virus.

The Old Wallow

At Davis station there are two good spots for looking at elephant seals. One is right out the front of the station on the beach. The other is the old wallow. As nothing to exciting has gone on in a bit I thought I might include this bit about the old wallow.

Firstly let me describe elephant seals. They are huge creatures that seem to do nothing all day. They lie on the beach, sometimes having fights or playing, but mostly just lying. When the need to move the go several meters, then decide it all seems to hard, lie down and have a rest for a few minutes before repeating the process.

They also seem to fart and poo a lot, and generally lay about in their own shed skin and poo.

The old wallow is good as it takes about 45 minutes to an hour to walk to around Heidemann Bay to the south of the station. It is a pleasant walk that does not take to long so it is done a few times. Te area the seals are in is not disturbed like the station beach, so there are hundreds, possibly thousands of years of seal skin and poo built up.

Unfortunatly this day their were not to many seals, although there were a few penguins saying hello.

On the way back we came across an emperor penguin chick malting, quite a rare site around the station.

 

Iceberg Cruz’n

Today we went out in the inflatable boats to have a look at icebergs.

We headed out after dinner in three boats with four people in each. For safety we could not get to close to the burgs, but it was still a very interesting trip.

While we were out we saw the Aurora Australis coming across the horizon, which was pretty exciting as it meant the ship was arriving in earlier than expected with all our goodies.

Nathan’s Birthday

This Saturday was Nathans birthday and to celebrate we had a karaoke night. Andy and I set up the karaoke so the words came up on the TV screen in the bar.

Some of the guys decided it would be a good night to dress up in drag. A rather concerning sight overall.

Drinks at the Met Shack

This Friday saw drinks at the met shack.

This is the office for the Bureau or Meteorology staff who work here. The bid garage door to the left opens twice a day and this is where the weather balloon gets launched from. The forecasters and observers do their weather stuff here.

Weekend at Watts Hut

With a day to recover from new years Nick R, Nick H, Chris, Bri and myself headed out on the 5 hour walk to Watts hut.

We stayed the night and headed back to station the next day. A nice relaxing weekend.

New Years

Ok, this is a bit late, but hey. Better late than never.

In order to celebrate new years in Antarctica we decided that we would have a theme party.

On the station people had brought clothes for dress up nights, and there is also a whole room with different fancy dress and props that have either been made or brought here and left.

We decided that a nice easy theme to ease everybody into fancy dress nights was Hollywood, where you could come as you favourite Hollywood character or actor.

A group of us spent the day decorating the wallow (this is the bar/lounge area at Davis). The station has a large compliment of lighting and audio so I set up a lighting rig to provide some Hollywood Esq atmosphere.

Kim and Squeeze the two chefs provided a selection of cocktail food that would beat any 5 star venue, complete with Satay chops, coconut prawn cocktails, and oyster shots.

Chinese in a BIG helicopter

Today the Chinese came to visit again, but this time they brought their big helicopter. I cant remeber what it was called but it started with a K.

Snow, Snow, Snow

Just a quick not to say I woke up this morning and it had been snowing overnight. Finally it felt a bit more like Antarctica at the station. It didn’t last long though before the snow melted.