Through the Eye of the Matt

A quick one - here's a little tour around the base that Matt (electronic engineer and stand-in met person) did today and i thought was quite good (right click and save as...):

Matt's Walkround

It's quite big (about 70MB, but nothing your real world internet broadband malarky can't handle)! At some point i'll do another one with some other stuff that he missed out...

It seems a shame to make a post with no pictures so here's some from my walk round the point a few days ago:

The Benefits of Nights...

You're up for sunrise! Last night was my last for the moment, so ive got to try and stay up for as long as i can today (Saturday) so that i go to bed at a normal time and get back into normal routine for Monday. Anyway, i had a walk round the point for a couple of hours this morning and tried to avoid the Fur Seals (their colloquial name - "furries" - belies a sinister and aggressive nature which is not even redeemed by them looking "cute", -as we know cuteness is considered an attribute of greater value to the human than potential to cause injury and then hideous infection). Anyway, you have to avoid the fur seals as much as possible which is surprisingly hard to do in low light, as they look very much like rocks, and move very like rocks as well, until you almost step on them. They then appear like rabid otters and roar at you. But the sunrise was beautiful and i took a few photos:

Me! Obviously...

Looking out from an ice overhang.

An Adelie penguin

A cormorant

The first of the winter trips left yesterday - these are our holidays from Rothera and take quite a few different forms, tailored as much as possible to the abilities and desires of the winterers. Mine is leaving in about a months time, and will be ski mountaineering mostly, using linked travel with skiidoos and sledges to get to a main campsite on Adelaide Island, then braching off from there...

Balloon Launch on a Beautiful Morning

Beautiful sunrise over the Arrowsmith Peninsula when i was walking over to the hangar to release the last weather balloon of the week.

Looking NE across hangar cove after the balloon went up nicely...

A Weddell seal skulking in the bottom lefthand corner, and some nice patterns on the sea surface as ice tries to form on the calm surface.

Me in front of the ice cliffs at the far end of hangar cove - we should be able to walk across and climb on them when the sea freezes over. OK, i'm off to bed now to be ready for my last nightshift tomorrow night! rob...

Musical Noodles

I've been fiddling about recently with the computer in the green room along with some new microphones that were brought down a few weeks ago for the band. So i thought i'd post up a few of the little musical doodles that i've been doing, with a view to learning enough about live sound recording to try and make the band sound good. Not that they don't already, it just takes a bit of skill (lots) to make a recording sound excellent and not just alright. Skills i dont yet have... Anyway:

Music for Landscapes

Guitar Suet

Drum'n'No Bass But Guitar Instead

This last one is an electronic one i did a couple of weeks back. Totally different style, you may notice...

Big Red Insects

Also, the Shackleton has been here and left this morning with the last of last year's winterers on it. Here's a pic of the ship (the one which i sailed down on) moored up at the wharf with a really nice sunset behind:





The leaving of the shackleton this morning was quite impressive - we had lots of out-of-date flares to get rid of and set them off as the ship left Rothera. I was lucky enough to jump in a RIB with Jim the boatman and a few others, and we chased the Shack at high speed (well, it felt like very high speed as we launched off the tops of waves and were airborne!) while we held out red smoke flares on either side and waved to the people on the monkey island (the "roof" of the ship). Hopefully someone took some pictures and i'll post them later. rob

Update!

Hello. apologies for the long time since the last update! I'm on night shift this week which has necessarily shifted me out of sync with the rest of the base which has been a bit odd, especially at the moment when last years winterers are leaving and there's a feeling of the end of one "chapter" (the summer) and the beginning of winter. I haven't been taking so many pictures recently but heres a couple from the last 2 weeks:

Here's a great effect that appeared over the hills to the west of the base across Ryder Bay as the sun went down. We've been having increasingly impressive sunsets and if i get any decent pictures ill post them...

And heres one of me playing a pared down drumkit up on the top of the ramp just next to the base. The BAS photographer has been down for a few weeks so he had the band members out on the snow to take some posed pics, but some of them are quite nice... Until next time. Which shouldn't be as long as the last last time this time!

Fossil Bluff Closedown

Hello all, i've just got back from a week at Fossil Bluff where i was helping to shut it down to prepare it for the winter. That basically involved a lot of inventorying and packing stuff away, as well as the standard Fossil Bluff jobs of refuelling the aircraft and depoting fuel drums for field use next year. I had to do some specific met related thingamyjigs so i was there for the full process which was great. The hut at fossil bluff was built decades ago, and it retains a real feeling of Antarctic history about it - it's got a Rayburn stove going non-stop for cooking and melting ice for water and to keep the place at a liveable temperature (it got down to -17 last week, it feels like winter is approaching fast and doesn't look like stopping...!). Toilet facilities are prvoded by a "rocket bog" - basically a normal toilet with no plumbing that fills up a tank, and then every so often you fill it with propane and light it, thus incinerating the nastiness and leaving the seat quite warm for a few hours afterwards... These first pictures were taken from the aeroplane on my way out, and show some of the ridiculous varieties of ice formations, mostly sea ice in various stages of development or dissapation.