Boating/ Sea Ice/ Marvelousness

Last sunday i got out on my first recreational boat trip - it was a stunning day and Kelvin the mountainous dive and boat maestro flung us around the bay in a RIB (rigid inflatable boat, which i'm also learning to drive), first up to the north where there are some stunning grounded icebergs, and then to the south to land on Lagoon Island (which i point out in one of my semi-legendary video clips (?!)), where there is a little simple bothy-type hut (see below) guarded by elephant seals - out of the water simply the most disgusting animals i've ever witnessed - to the point where it's comical! I might post some video in a bit of Ken (generator mechanic and old punk) getting into the hut which was quite amusing... Anyway, here's some photos....

Kelvin and Stella the RIB - 80 agitated horses on the back of this beast, Stella is mostly used for dive operations.

The hut on Lagoon, surrounded by elephants. These monsters can weigh several tons when fully bloated - their favourite (only) activity is letting vast amounts of putrid gas escape from their living corpses regularly and loudly. I am reliably informed that they are the epitomy of elegance under the water though, and i don't doubt it - they are specially designed for deep diving, and can happily dive to 1500m. That's one and a half kilometres straight downwards into water, just shy of a mile...

A very cool bit of iceberg - this one is about 15 - 20m high, and took on a look almost reminiscent of nougat or meringue.

Pancaking of the sea-ice near the base - early signs of sea-ice approaching. These pancakes start really thin, and gradually layer up then start rafting on each other and sticking together (if it's cold and calm enough for a decent length of time.

More pancake ice looking rather lovely.

The green building on the left with the red window edges is our new building - it was supposed to be finished by now, but instead it's a half empty shell that will be finished next summer, just in time for my second winter...

OK - c'est ca for now - things are very busy with work and preparations for my WINTER TRIP which starts on Sunday hopefully. Weather permitting...

Distorted Blues!

No new photos for a while (we've had rubbish weather for several days) so here's another bit of guitar that i recorded last night - for some reason i'm really enjoying blues riffs at the moment - not, i hasten to add, a reflection of my state of mind at all - i just really like the sound of distorted electric guitars playing rhythmic droning sort of tunes like this one. Guitar recording has temporarily taken over from electronic beats for the moment, partly because it takes much less time, but i'll get back to the squeaks and bleeps soon no doubt!

Distorted Blues

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A Bit of Video from Last Week

Here's a couple of little insights into the surroundings of Rothera from last week, when the James Clark Ross arrived to take "Summer" away, and replace it with "Winter":

Short Film

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New Strings Attached

I put some strings on my guitar this afternoon when i was feeling a bit low and missing home and stuff, so i sat down and recorded a bit of music to make me feel better. It's all made from the same acoustic guitar, and treated afterwards in cubase to make the bass and electric bits apart from a tiny vocal bit that appears twice). Here it is:

Dilation Blues

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That's all for now. Hi to all friends and family in the real world! love rob

Stork North

It was a beautiful and cold (-10 Celcius, a temperature Halley people would consider barbecue weather, but cold for Rothera at this time of year), and I had a chance to go for my first proper snow/ice climbing trip after a few intros on technique.

Myself, Mark Gorin (GA) and Andy Webb (Mechanic) headed out early by skidoo to climb Stork North, which is one of 3 "Stork" hills the middle of which provides Stork Bowl that i've posted about before.

This picture shows part of the route we took (you can see it better by enlarging the picture) which was a good introductory climb - not too steep but exposed enough if you're not used to it - if you fell or slipped without being roped up you wouldn't stop 'til you hit the bottom. It took us about 5 hours to get to the top from here.

Andy belaying Mark (letting out just enough rope for him to climb, but leaving very little slack so that if Mark was to slip then he would fall the least distance possible). This is a bit more than half way up.

Mark climbing ahead to set up a new set of anchors another rope's length (a pitch) further up the snow arete.

A couple of photos of us at the top of the climb, with some pretty stunning views.

A couple of the view to the NW, which is one that we hardly ever get to see because of the wall of the Stork Mountains in the way. On the skyline, the flat area of snow at the far right is McCallum's Pass, the only way to through to the Western side of Adelaide Island and where most of the winter trips travel through at some point. It's heavily crevassed and is quite tricky to navigate, and is immediately followed by the infamous Shambles Glacier, but I should be finding out a lot more about that in a few weeks when i head out on my first winter trip.

We then headed SW down a knife edge ridge towards a col (low saddle bit between 2 mountains) between North and Middle Storks, and walked down off the ridge and then in big arc back to the skidoo to avoid crevasses at the base of the hill. I was a pretty excellent day, and i hopefully will do a fair bit more of this sort of stuff. It would be pretty excellent to get up a hill this way and then ski down to maximise excitement... I might stick some more photos up in Andy's got some good ones.

JCR arrives, I take pictures

An Iceberg. A Nice One.

I Call This A Sunny Photograph of What Our Base Looked Like At The Time That The Photograph Was Taken From The Point That I Was Wielding My Camera At The Time I Took It. Or something equally pretentious...!

The tiny JCR and the considerably larger Mt. Gaudry (>8000ft)

Mooring crew which i was to join just after taking this picture, waiting to moor the JCR as it came alongside.

Recently i have been wracking my brains to try and take pictures of things that could maintain the interest in what i'm doing of those reading this blog. So tonight i present something rare, something never before displayed on this blog, something of such great splendour and scarcity that it's image should not really be shown too often for fear of debasing it's value. This special photograph that i have for you today contains almost ALL of the plant life of the Antarctic continent, over 50 Great Britains all squashed together at the bottom of the globe, and all major cities and settlements long since engulfed in ferocious snow. The semi-devine "Lichen". Pronounced by me with the scottish rasping "ch" of "loch", and by David Attenborough with the softer but sillier sounding "ch" of "children". And it's black! If there was a god he would have made this little plant bright yellow like gorse, or red like on an Admiral butterfly's wings.

More little video clips to follow... rob

Sunday Tune

A beautiful Sunday, I had a pretty relaxing day on my first Sunday for a while not on gash or met or asleep due to nightshift duties. So i read, and hunted for "eggs"which were actually made of the gastronomically superior substance chocolate, and played around in the green room recording some more musical mosaics like this one:

Warmth Music

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Doing things like that help a lot when missing people, places, voices.

A New Sport

I tried snowboarding for the first time a few days ago at Vals, which is a bit slow for skiing on if you're experienced, and absolutely loved it! We had about 6 inches of nice powder up there so the multiple falls were cushioned, but by the end of a few runs i could get down the slope without falling and was putting in some half decent turns.... It feels good to have a new sport to work on - you need as many "projects" (if thats not too businesslike a name) to keep you occupied down here as possible, to counter the relative absence of cultural or environmental stimulation. That is not to say that there aren't amazing landscapes and a "culture" of sorts here, but that they're narrow and need to be personally expanded by any means possible!

The view from Vals to the North, across the skiway to the peaks of Stork. The hill on the left is Middle Stork, and Stork Bowl pretty much runs from the top of that down to the left. It's good fun skijouring (sp?) across the snow plain there which means getting towed behind a skidoo on skiis.

A few more photos

Just a few pictures today...

Here's Neil (logistics co-ordinator) doing a little bit of light incineration of an afternoon - the four wire cages along the front of the incinerator container are full of bags of dried, enzyme treated excrement which need to be burned every so often. Neil is wearing a face mask, but it's surprisingly fragrance free when it's been munched on by enzymes for a while... But while the enzymes are mid-meal, as they are when you walk into the STP (sewage treatment plant) then you really know about it! Other waste like wood and food are disposed of in this way too.

Icebergs crowding around the end of the runway and into hangar cove, sunrise behind.