A twin Otter full of people (which in Antarctica is only 7) arrived late last night, and was followed by a second today. The additional 14 people have swelled our numbers here to nearly 40. Most importantly, the first Twin Otter brought both food and master chef Jean Louis - definitely a good combination.

Inger the Antarctic tortoise also arrived on the second Twin Otter. She has been at a loose end in Terra Nova Bay and, in true Antarctic spirit, has spent the last couple of days helping to paint the station.

The Station doctor at Dome C has taken to measuring the oxygen saturation of people's blood, which he does with a nifty and painless gadget in a matter of seconds. Hopefully his research will shed light on the physiological adaption to altitude, which varies greatly even for different occasions for a single individual. So far, in eleven trips to Antarctica I have been lucky, although my oxygen readings this morning were far from impressive.

We kicked off the morning by asking the Kaseborer driver to level a place next to the AASTINO for our tent. In previous years this has not been necessary, but the snow build-up this year is very marked. A Kaseborer, by the way, is a thing like a bulldozer but optimized for shifting snow. In two minutes it had done the work that would have taken three of us all morning. I rode in the cab (as is every schoolboy's dream) and issued instructions to the driver in rather broken French. Mainly I wanted him to avoid knocking the AASTINO over, which was a fairly self-evident requirement anyway, but also to avoid digging up the wires to the Automatic Weather Station that Tony had buried last year. I described them as "fils" which I think is right but I'm worried now it might be French for "son", which would have conjured up some bizarre images in the driver's mind. Anyway, whatever they are, he didn't dig them up.

As it turns out, the wires to the AWS are not very well buried, so I decided to dig them up and put them in a deeper trench. The snow shovel was rather too crude an implement for this, but I could find nothing better. As Jon remarked as I rummaged through our tools: "I can't believe we came all this way and brought all this stuff with us, but forgot to bring a garden trowel". It's on the list for next year.

Next task was to bring out our Stirling engine "Sid" from the cargo tent, which we did by lugging it onto a Skidoo sled and towing it out to the AASTINO. Sid spent the first winter at Dome C, but was returned to the factory last year so we could try out a different kind of O-ring in his internals.

Nancy will be sent back to the factory for reconditioning. I think she will need more than o-rings. Manhandling the engines on and off the skidoo was hard work, at -34 C and in a 10 knot wind. They weigh 90 kg each.

Jon swapped engines over - a complicated and messy task involving lots of swearing. It takes about the same length of time as swapping engines in a Hercules. Jon has devised an ingenious technique for draining the engines of glycol without getting half of it on the floor, as we used to in the good old days. Basically he uses the wet-and-dry workshop vacuum cleaner to suck out the coolant, then he empties the vacuum cleaner into a bucket. If this procedure worries you, dear reader, be assured that nowhere in the vacuum cleaner manual does its say "do not use this appliance to suck coolant out of engines". Furthermore, nowhere in the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) for glycol does it say anything about vacuum cleaners. So, I think we're on safe ground here.

Sid fired up with little drama and put out a healthy 750 watts. With the messy engine-changing work over, we'll convert the vacuum cleaner back to the role its manufacturer intended for it, clean up the AASTINO, and concentrate on the instruments themselves.

Next came the tent, which is a standard camping tent we put up next to the AASTINO to store things in and to give ourselves a bit more work space. Putting the tent up took only a few minutes, as we've had a bit of practice now. However the fly was another matter, and took me a further two hours. Jon was in the AASTINO sorting engines out, and I didn't want to disturb him in case he suggested we swap jobs.

Suze emerged for lunch looking a whole lot better. She came out to the tent and unpacked her experiment and the various other important things that arrived on the last Twin Otter flight. Now we have everything we need, except for our calcium hydride desiccant and about another month of time.

Dinner was a Jean Louis masterpiece. We're saved.
- John