Relief, Fakemas and a Module Move

Happy New Year to everybody! 

It’s certainly been busy here at Halley 6a for a number of weeks. And with just about 8 weeks left in the summer season there’s still a load of work to be done.

Our “Relief” went smoothly. For those that don’t know that is when the ship, the RRS Ernest Shackelton, arrives with all our supplies for the coming year (and more). Obviously we are not right at the edge of the ice shelf so the ship has to moor a little ways away and all the containers, fuel drums, random cargo gets dragged here on sledges towed by various large vehicles. Nearly all the new cargo came here to 6a rather than 6 and so we had two teams working 24 hours in 12-hour shifts for a week and a half.

This meant we worked through Christmas and Boxing Day and shifted our celebrations to the 28^th  - on Fakemas. The guys who had been on nights had a day or so to switch their body clocks back so we could have a traditional Fakemas dinner together and a little down time.

From a kitchen point of view Dinner went well. We started with some canapés and some mulled cider. A soup starter was next followed by a mandarin sorbet before launching in to a full on turkey dinner with all the trimmings. I’m not sure if many bothered with the Fakemas pud or cheese board to finish but they were there all the same.  There were also the obligatory Fakemas board games on the go – Banagrams (if that’s how you spell it)….where have you been all my life??

Looking slightly Fakemassy in my room :)

Canapés and mulled cider. 

I managed to grab a day off on “Foxing” day thanks to Al and Rich offering to cook dinner for everybody. So I finally got out on my new skis with my camera and took a few photos in some lovely roasting weather. The base has such a small footprint at the moment, which is really nice for some reason. 

The garage and vehicles team has groomed the perimeter for a smooth ski around. 

The cargo lines are looking neat, tidy and plentiful!

I also got round to taking a pic of the fuel dumps. We use bulk tanks for a lot of fuel, but we still use a lot of drums too. These get stacked methodically – as shown. I wish I had got some photos of the unloading and stacking process, but these usually came in during Relief right before and during meal times! Maybe next year!

And the big news a couple of evenings ago was the first Module being towed here to 6a from 6. It arrived at around 2am. It wasn’t known exactly how long it would take to shift it here and it ended up being much quicker than people thought – at about 6kmph I believe. What a sight to see that coming over the horizon!

 A few of us hopped onto skidoos to go and see it and see it crossing the perimeter here. 

The garage and vehicles guys have done great work on the “road” and the tracks the Module left were so surprisingly shallow and soft – just a single hard ridge in the centre of each track. From the perimeter to its final destination the vehicles followed a central flag line. In this pic Doc Neil is taking each flag out and laying it down for the vehicles and modules to drive over. 

My camera battery decided to die, just before it got into place unfortunately.

We have another planned Module move tonight with the Drewery being moved in the next few days. This is the summer accommodation and will double our lovely peaceful numbers here at 6a (sad face). It means all the tech guys will be here getting to work on the Modules as they move over one by one.

Move to Temporary Camp 6a

A lot has happened in the last few weeks and it has been really busy on the work front – hence the lack of a blog post!

The Temp Camp at 6 is fully up and running and soon to be fully inhabited. 

The entrance!

It's been a busy time! The kitchen stores in the modules needed emptying out and sharing between the stores in the two temporary camps and the other stores we have at the two stations now. Frozen food that was buried last year needed digging out and storing in the freezer in the temporary camp and site 6. This will happen at 6a in the next few days so I’ll try and get photos of that at this side. There was cargo to sort to go out to the Falklands at First Call, when the ship comes in, next week. And there was the small matter of cooking for 80 people in the mean time. Busy times. Thankfully the summer chefs are in to work with Victoria (outgoing wintering chef) and me, so that freed me up to do the admin bit. 

I have now relocated to the new temporary camp at site 6a. It has taken a couple of weeks to get it up and running. A small party of people were based here for that time to enable work day parties to come across and do what they needed to do to get the camp habitable – get it sealed up, plumbing in, electrics etc. I came over a few days ago and we had a few evenings here with just a handful of us, which felt so nice after the business of the past weeks. Nice view from the kitchen too!

We had a bit of weather, though, and with just 3 of us on base here at that time it meant a lot of digging! The snow really accumulates around the Weatherhaven mess tent. If not dealt with it would bury and be crushed and so it needs digging out. Directly by the tent this needs to be done by hand to avoid damaging it, but the diggers can lend a hand when possible. Unfortunately there were no diggers here at 6a, so this meant digging it out by hand several times in the day as the wind kept blowing. Al and Sam did most of it while I sorted some kitchen and stores bit, but I did a bit too! Demoralising when you keep shovelling and shovelling and when you turn around it’s all filled right back in again! The weather cleared up eventually and we had a lovely, quiet, sunny evening to enjoy.

It was really nice to look at the Tag Board here at 6a and see only 3 names. Our tags are metal as we are part of a wintering team, whereas the summer folk have plastic tags. Just nice to see that Al and I were the first of the wintering team to be based here at 6a. The blue tags are layered at the bottom as there are so many people at site 6 at the mo. It's been peaceful here at 6a...

The general set out of the camp is nearly the same as at 6. We have a few more bed room containers and a doctor’s surgery here, and no laundry, which is different from camp 6. We also have less bathroom facilities as the original plan was to move the Drewery building (the one I was living in at 6) earlier and to have it here to provide more bathroom and laundry facilities. But we do have a couple of loos and showers so it will be fine and we send our laundry back to site 6 to be done for us! Not such a hardship!

But as I said the lay out is the same really with a large Weatherhaven tent to use as our mess tent, which is quite a nice space really. The containers are all lined up with a covered corridor to connect everything.

 There were a couple of small spaces that needed sealing after the blow but nothing too serious.  

It’s quite warm really  - perfectly comfortable. The bed room containers actually have under-floor heating and can be too warm!

I’ll make sure to take more photos of all the container “rooms” at another time.

The garage is being moved here today and so more people have arrived and we’ll be up to around 20 by the end of the week.  I hope to get some photos of that when it arrived in a few hours time. The journey time between bases varies as to what vehicle you use – SnowCat, Piston Bully, John Deer – all painfully slow, with the Skidoos being a bit nippier. But when towing a big garage building the time slows considerably!

I managed to take a couple of photos whilst out helping with the melt tank at site 6 before I left. The melt tanks are filled from the top so the dozer makes a ramp up to it and pushes the snow up. All we have to do is then help some of it in and then clear the area where the lid goes so it can close properly.

Temporary Camp at Halley 6

As most of you know, the big (huge!) project this season is moving the camp from it ‘s current position, at Halley 6, to a new position about 23km away – Halley 6a. The main job on site so far has been getting the Temporary Camp up and running so that people can move out of the modules and work can then start on decommissioning them. The Temp Camp is built mostly out of containers joined together by a sealed corridor, which leads to a communal mess tent, or Weatherhaven tent, at the end. The containers have all been kitted out so they work as sleeping quarters, bathroom units, a boot room, a laundry, a melt tank, a freezer, a fridge, a dry stores, and of course a kitchen.

The above pic shows the Temp Camp infront of the Modules. To the right is the WASP (work shop) and then at the far right are the Tech team containers.

The Weatherhaven tent with the kitchen container to the right.

As usual there are also people still staying in the Drewery building (the summer accommodation unit), which is where I am for now. But this year there are also four cabooses outside housing more people. They each sleep four people. I’ll make sure to get some pics of the interiors of them and the temp camp at a later date, as it’s an interesting set-up.

The move to the Temp Camp could come early next week, at which point we’ll have to move out of the main kitchen to be working there. We are three chefs at the moment with a fourth joining us in a couple of week’s time. The idea is to set up another Temporary Camp at the 6a site and have the chefs split between them.

Cape Town to Halley

Lucky for us our plane from Cape Town stayed more or less on schedule and we found ourselves heading to the airport early on Thursday morning. You check in with ALCI (the company we fly into Antarctica with) as you would any other flight and go through normal airport security.

It’s a pretty “no-frills” affair, but comfortable. The flight to Novo (a Russian base) took about 5 hours during which we were offered refreshments and were able to use the loos – two port-a-loos strapped down at the back of the plane. When we neared our destination we were asked to put on our warm clothing and we were able to watch our landing on a TV screen at the front which beams through footage from a camera in the nose cone.

We hung around at Novo for a little while. There was cargo to sort and passenger lists to adapt. The initial plan was to fly us on to Halley in two groups in quick succession. But the crew from the next plane we would be using were called in to help with a medical evacuation else where in Antarctica. Luckily, they were still able to take one group through, and I was in that group. The next group are having to hang out at Novo for a little while until the middle of next week … hopefully!

And so it was on to the Basler plane. These planes fly through Halley from time to time and always look amazing, so it was great to get a chance to fly on one. We helped the crew load her up and we were on our way. A quick 4 hour journey over to Halley in amazing weather! A Piston Bully towing a sledge was our taxi ride from the ski-way up to base. We quickly unloaded our bags and grabbed some dinner, whilst saying hello to the wintering team we left months ago in March. This was followed by a quick briefing and then to bed. Easy as that!

Cape Town

A very quick post from Cape Town. A large group of us from BAS travelled down on Sunday/Monday and should all go well we will continue our journey to Halley tomorrow. But we had a day and a half to have a look around Cape Town with some fantastic weather. An open bus city tour was the order of the day.

Autumn Colours

I've been trying to make the most of my time before I head South in little under a week! It's hard to try and make sure you see people, whilst trying to sort all those little last bits and bobs out. But it's been lovely seeing family, some old friends, and soaking up all those lovely Autumn colours. I'll soon be surrounded with mostly all white, so I'm trying to absorb and remember all these wonderful greens, reds, oranges, yellows and browns while I still can.