JACARA - Antarctic Diaries

Mamma mia! What a busy day. We've had an ongoing job list stuck to the wall which was in a pretty poor state at this stage from all the scribbles, so our first job was to write a new one. Even though this is our last day here the job list still took a whole A4 piece of paper, probably because we are writing down every stupid thing that we know we'll forget to do at four in the morning. Having a job list is both scary (because it is so long) and satisfying (because each time one of us finishes a job we have a small celebration and crossing out ceremony). The wind was around 15-20 knots today, the windchill around - 44 degrees and we still had a few outside tasks to do...hmmmm.... We decided to pull the tent down first, to provide humourous entertainment for anyone watching. Jon went around and pulled all the pegs for the tent fly, thereby creating a massive sail which I tried to hold down and not go flying halfway back to Sydney, via the roof of the AASTINO. We folded it up, compared it to the size of the bag, fell on the snow laughing and shoved it through the door of the AASTINO. We extracted the tent poles and had the usual troubles with those annoying poles which come apart in segments joined by elastic. Just as you think you've got it all folded up, twang! The stupid thing snaps open again trying to take your eye out in the process. Next we thought we'd be really clever and undo the pegs for the rest of the tent with the direction of the wind, folding it as we went. Any observers would have been extremely impressed with this method which worked surprisingly well. We folded that part up, didn't bother comparing it to the size of the bag and shoved it inside. We extracted all the pegs which were frozen into the snow and shoved them, the poles and ourselves inside the AASTINO. Back in the warmth of the AASTINO we wrestled the tent in the bag and collapsed on the floor for a while. After warming up we headed back outside again to pack up the crates that live in the snow all year. Like any packing experience this involved a lot of shoving, squishing and cursing. With everything somewhat in the boxes I sat on the lids while Jon screwed them down with our misbehaving cordless drill. Back inside I repeated this delightful experience and packed up the boxes that are coming home with us, all up this gave us a fair bit more room in the AASTINO. We had got our hands on a skidoo so we loaded the boxes and me (to hold the boxes down) onto a trailer and with the strict instructions not to go to fast, Jon sped off to the station while I held on for dear life. Being in a retroing mood we had a hunt in the wood-workshop to find Nancy the stirling engine who is going back to NZ. We had last seen Nancy 3 weeks ago but figured she couldn't have run too far away. We found her and stuck on a shipping label (she was going to Whispergen via the International Antarctica Centre in Christchurch via the Italica via Terra Nova Bay via Twin Otter) - she was rather embarassed to see that the label shows her weight (this lassie weighs in at 100kg). After filling up on lunch we also put ourselves, our luggage and our cargo on the scales. Due to the number of people shipping out on the next two flights everyone is limited to around 100kg weight and each weight has to be entered onto Rita's weight spreadsheet (which determines if our plane can take off). The heavy box went on my tally, I think Jon has had a few more eclairs than me...we also dumped our box of lithium batteries and a jar of used calcium hydride in Rita's lap. Rita had kindly agreed to organise disposal of these which both have to travel as dangerous goods. Deciding to torture ourselves further in the cold our next mission was to put the Iridium phone antenna on a pole somewhere. The “somewhere” depending on how far the cable would reach from the AASTINO. While Jon held one end of the cable just inside the door I trudged around outside with the other end seeing if it would reach anything worthy of holding an antenna, for example a flag pole...nope. Right, we threaded the cable out the other end of the AASTINO hoping that it would reach the solar panels...nope, we would have to plant a new pole. We reefed a length of copper pipe out from underneath the AASTINO that was conviently the correct diameter to hold the antenna... coincidence? I think not...ha, of course it was, this pipe was brought down 2 years ago to make the exhaust. Sadly deciding that there was no reason to vice-squish the pipe, we hammered it into the snow, mounted the antenna, added some cable ties and aluminium tape for good measure and raced back inside to defrost. We had one last outside task to do which we had been putting off for the last few days due to the windchill. After seeing a photo of Nigel on the roof, our head smurf back at UNSW had suggested we remove some of the aluminium tape around the pipe as it would probably collect snow. I armed myself with all the tools I thought we could possibly need and a couple extra just to feel like Rambo. We gloved up and went outside, taking our customary positions for Nigel surgery: me on the roof and Jon perched on the ladder. We had put the aluminium tape around the pipe to hold the fibres in place so we had to be careful not to remove the crucial bits when performing this delicate surgery on Nigel...with a screwdriver, knife and pliers. This was a long and literally painful exercise which took us three rounds due to the necessary run back inside after about 5 minutes to defrost fingers. While Jon got busy back at his usual job of beating the supervisor into submission I decided to reinstall the ceiling fan at its safe height of about neck level. This was a relatively simple task made a bit more difficult by the fact that the box we had been using to stand on to reach the ceiling was now sitting in the station all packed up, weighed and waiting for a twin otter. This meant I had to sit on the heaters attached to the engines which, although nice and warm, are not the ideal height for working on the ceiling. While tinkering away I noticed that Jon had been outside for a while. Curiosity, coupled with annoyance at the fan made me wander outside to see if he had perhaps been taken by a rogue penguin that had travelled from the coast with the sole intention of eating Jon. I stepped outside, looked past the large tractor sitting a meter away from the door and around the 1000 litre tank of fuel that it was carrying, to see if there was anything suspious going on. My investigations lead me to find Luigi sitting on top of one of our fuel tanks either breathing in jet fuel fumes or checking the level. With my superior powers of deduction I determined that we were getting our fuel tanks filled...Jon confirmed my suspiousions and I took lots of photos (I think Luigi thought I was the one that had been sniffing fumes). Back inside, I finished putting the fan up and decided I needed to make a fan blocking device (or a person blocking device - whichever way you want to look at it) to stop Karim from a nasty incident if he forgot to turn the fan off in a winter visit. This also gave me another excuse to play with the power tools. Now, instead of being given a rather severe haircut, Karim only had to worry about walking into a wooden sign. Jon demonstrated this a number of times as he went back and forth up the AASTINO to play around with the electronics and service Sid. In a effort to annoy Jon even more, I decided to put up black out curtins across everything in the AASTINO that had an LED. This was to stop random light from entering MASS and Nigel. So with the electronics rack and the engine control panel blacked out, Jon continued to work on the electronics and engines...hehehe. At this stage I decided a good AASTINO cleaning was in order – someone had covered the place in sawdust. I put on my Sadie the Cleaning Lady hat and tidied everything up, made some more labels and vacuumed the floor. Again I probably annoyed Jon by pushing his chair (with him on it) around the AASTINO while I was vacuuming. About an hour before dinner we decided a courtesy visit to the atmospheric physicists, out near the 30m tower, was in order to check out the SODAR they have installed. Their SODAR is huge compared to ours, the horns standing about a meter high. However their SODAR doesn't make up little bird tunes like ours, rather it just beeps out one tone. After having a tour of all their instruments we decided to climb the 30m tower. The tower is about 2m x 2m wide and made of scaffolding so it's a bit scary to climb. Luckily the wind had died down to almost nothing (now that we had finished all our outside jobs...grumble) so the tower wasn't moving around much. The view from the top is absolutely beautiful. The air is so clear you can see forever across snow and ice that no one has ever walked on. We took some photos, however I really don't think they will do it justice, this is a view that will have to stay as a beautiful memory. Back down on the ground we were given a skidoo ride back to the station for our last dinner (just as well, this was the first time in a month that my legs had seen elevation and done any hard work!) Disappointing for Jon, our last dinner at Dome C was beef in mushroom sauce - he has an inane fear of mushrooms. However I can assure you it was delicious, the beef so tender it just fell apart. After dinner we checked the time of our flight for the next morning – 6:30 am - and Jon was told in stern tones that he had to be back at the station by 6 am or he would be in big trouble. We decided to say our goodbyes to everyone and then head back out to our favourite green kiwi fruit. While Jon shook everyone's hand I started my tally of cheek kisses...let's see around 50ish people on the station, two cheeks per person...you do the math. Back out at the AASTINO and armed with swiss chocolate we found everything exactly as we had left it, the space aliens hadn't visited yet. We examined the joblist and then hurriedly put it away. At about 3am I ran out of jobs and asked Jon for another one, "it's a rather nasty job but you can rewire the batteries" he suggested. I foolishly agreed. Rewiring the batteries involves climbing behind the engines into a space about 60cm wide, sitting on top of the batteries and working on the circuits which lie conviently between your feet - not a job for anyone with a bad back or who isn't at the lowest end of the pecking order. The propect of this job lead me to proclaim "I'm just going to have to take my pants off!" I was currently wearing thermals, jeans, my pink fleecy pants and the yellow overalls which resulted in me having the flexibility of a sumi wrestler. I don't think a sumi wrestler has ever tried to climb behind the engines in the AASTINO so rather, than prove that one possibly could, I stripped off my overalls. Jon now explained what I had to do with the batteries and although it was a rather easy task to explain it took about 3 goes for me to finally understand, turns out that my brain works really slow with lack of sleep and I'm going to blame the altitude as well. When I was about midway through Jon called a coffee break which was lucky because if I dropped the soldering iron or burnt myself once more while trying to solder 2 bit of wires together in midair between my feet, something was going to go through the wall of the AASTINO. At about 5:30am we decided we had better get our stuff together and do all the last minute things. We ran around madly checked the MASS PMT shutter was open and the viewer mirror off axis (or we wouldn't get any MASS data), packed Simone up to come home, put the lid on the electronics rack and placed Nigel's drip tray on top. Right on cue, at about 5:50 am the supervisor computer crashed for absolutely no reason we could see except that it was already missing us. We rebooted it, grabbed everything and loaded onto the skidoo. Don't ask me how we managed to carry 2 backpacks, one large kit bag, Simone, the oscilliscope and two people on a skidoo. We stopped off at the free time tent to pick up some more stuff and arrived in the coffee room only 10 minutes late and collasped into chairs to await our flight.
- Suze