Yarrr!

Capt'n Geek-Boy

As I be sure ye all be knowin', Septembaaarrr 19th be International Talk Like A Pirate Day. It also be the day on which Captain Geek-Boy be getting a year closer to Davey Jones' locker.

Bein' as not a right lot happens down here in the Great South Seas, it be a good excuse to splice the mainbrace, shiver some timbers and keelhaul the land-lubbers.
Captain Geek-Boy made good haul of bounty with a picture frame, writin' stick and catapult for keepin' maraudin' scoundrels at bay. The Good Ship 'Cake' sailed by an' was captured by by lurkin' buccaneers who razed it to the waterline.
It should probably be known, me hearties, that the smoke from 30 candles be enough to set the fire alarms off...!

Pirates Of The Adelaide Island

The Good Ship 'Cake'

Fishy Business

Tide gauge

The Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory (POL) maintain a network of sensors around the UK and the South Atlantic to monitor tidal elevation. Rothera's well house (built as the intake for our reverse osmosis plant which provides our drinking water) is an ideal site for a tide sensor as it is directly connected to the sea by an underground pipe, so the level is the well is always the same as the current sea level.

As part of my job, I carry out calibration water level dips for POL so that they can check that their automated equipment is doing what it should be. In summer this involves walking to the well house, jumping up onto the roof (it is about waist-high), lifting the lid and climbing down the ladder inside. After six months of winter it is a slightly different game, as first I have to spend half an hour digging through the snow to find the lid, clearing enough snow to be able to lift the lid and give myself somewhere to stand so that I can open it, and then try to climb into it safely.

Once inside it is not too unpleasant though, as there is a heater which stops the damp affecting the electrics used to run the monitoring equipment, and it is out of the wind and snow.

I use a tape measure on a reel which has a sensor on the end (a 'dipper') to measure from a datum point on the grating inside the well house down to the surface of the water. When the sensor touches the water it beeps, and I read the tape measure. I take one dip every five minutes, for around an hour each side of low and high tide. Audio books and knitting help to fill in the intervening four minutes between dips! We aim to do 30 calibrations per year, at a mix of high and low tides, and try to select tides which have at least 1m (3ft) difference between the high and the low. As Rothera has a strange double-tide, sometimes there is only 30cm (1ft) difference between the highs and lows; this can mean dipping at unsociable hours to get a useful tide! The folks at POL are very appreciative of our work though, as it helps to improve their tide modelling and prediction systems for the whole of the Atlantic. It has also helped other organisations with tsunami modelling, as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was detected by the tide sensor at Rothera, and earlier this year the recent earthquake in Chile caused a 20cm jump in the tide trace, and we could see that it took several days for the tide to settle back to normal. For those interested, Rothera's live tidal information can be seen here.

Mr Fish

As barely a fortnight can pass between birthdays, and on the theme of the sea, I present to you Mr Fish, the latest in a long line of creative birthday cakes. Mr Fish is for one of our GAs who, in the real world, is a keen fly-fisherman. Down here he contents himself with spending his evenings making flies and dreaming of trout-fishing in New Zealand.

Rothera Point Sea Ice

A Chocolate Cake Tool Kit!

Wednesday was our generator mechanic's 40th birthday. Having seen photos on Facebook of the wonderful cakes his wife at home makes, we felt we ought to try to make his 40th cake something special. A team effort, admittedly mostly lead by the chef, resulted in a spanner, hammer, nut, grub screw and a bottle of WD40, all made from chocolate cake and iced with molten chocolate. We couldn't find 40 candles, and even if we had, we would probably have set the fire alarm off, so we settled for 11 baby pink ones instead! I 'helped' clean up the icing bags and excess icing a few hours earlier, and couldn't face actually eating any cake, but it disappeared suitably quickly!

Testing The Thickness Of The Sea Ice

This afternoon the clouds cleared and the wind dropped, so a few of us set out the test the thickness of the sea ice around base. We set out to go around Rothera Point, but were prepared to get back onto land and come back to base that way if necessary. To test sea ice, one drills a hole all the way through, and then inserts a very technical stick which has a lever on the end. You pull the stick back up until you feel the lever catch on the underside of the ice, and then read the depth off the stick. The ice has to be a minimum of 20cm thick for people to ski on it, 25cm for walking, and so on upwards to 157cm to land a Hercules! We had 30-40cm thickness all the way, so successfully made our way around the point. It was very strange seeing the land from the ice, and to be able to look up at the wharf. The ice feels so substantial, but six months ago I was bobbing about here in a boat doing my crew training.

This evening one of the GAs did a slide show (yes, slides, with a whirring motor, genuine clicky noises and everything!) of a climbing trip he did in his younger days around the USA which was a nice change to the usual knitting, DVD watching or pool playing. On the knitting front, the dinosaur is progressing nicely. I have changed the pattern so that I am knitting in the round with the legs and plates knitted on, as I didn't fancy sewing ten stegosaurus plates down its back!

Biscoe Wharf From The Sea Ice

Midwinter's Week Round-Up

This week's vital statistics

• Rows of sock knitted: 54
• Exciting boxes of presents received: 1
• Rows of sock frogged back: 54
• Horizontal bungee rope challenges run: 3
• Rows of sock re-knitted: 43
• Amount of paracetamol taken to fix neck after bungee run: Lots

This week has nominally been a 'week off' for most of base. Since the weather doesn't take a week off, we've still been doing met obs and balloon launches, and fixing things that break, but most normal work has been suspended.

Midwinter's Day and the Winter Olympics have been covered in earlier posts, so this is just a round-up of what else has happened this week.

I wanted to get a blog and online photos sorted by the end of the week, and have accomplished the blog (evidently), but online photos are taking a bit more work, partly due to the slow internet, and partly because knitting is so much more interesting than faffing around online.

I've started the Pomatomus socks from Knitty, but despite knitting to gauge, it wouldn't fit over my ankle. I ripped it back and started again on bigger needles and it feels much better - more elastic - and the pattern is showing more. I won't finish a sock this week (my original aim), but they are at least on the needles, and can be returned to when I get fed up with my blanket.

As it has largely been dark and windy, I've watched a lot of 'Harry Potter' and 'Northern Exposure' while knitting. On Thursday, Geek-Boy and I were on cooking duty, so made Chunky Chicken Stew (a.k.a. Left-Over Surprise) and chunky wholemeal rolls. It was all eaten, so I assume it was okay.

On Friday we went skiing on the Ramp, which is the bit of glacier opposite base and offers the steepest skiing available. It was pretty icy in places but we had fun playing on the slalom course that was used for the Winter Olympics until the wind became too strong for it to be any fun any more. In the evening we had a bar crawl around various bars that people had set up around base. We went 'Under The Sea' in the marine sciences laboratory, to the 'Texas Penitentiary' for orally administered 'lethal injections' and of course the horizontal bungee-run provided by the GAs.

This involves wearing a skidoo helmet and boiler suit, then being anchored to the far end of the corridor with a large bungee cord. One then runs down the corridor in an attempt at reaching the drinks lined up at the end. First available is water, then lemonade, lager, John Smith's, Guinness and a final prize of Pisco. I don't think anyone reached the Pisco, but many good attempts were made. Sadly, being fast-moving and in the dark, it was hard to photograph.

Saturday evening was the debut performance of this year's winter band, 'Snow Rhythm'. They played a good set, and it was all the more impressive as several members had never played before the band formed. It was also one of the GA's birthdays, so out came the obligatory themed cake and everyone finished the week on a sugar high.