Wednesday, January 25, 2006
posted 1/25/2006 08:23:00 PM UTC+12, McMurdo Local Time

Busy day at work, ended up in 150 (pronounced "one-five-oh", our pickup) this morning on a mission to drop off a drum at hazwaste (hazardous waste) and run a Herman Nelson (big gas powered heater thingy) out to Willy Field. But, as is usual for the first person in the truck everyday, I ended up doing all kinds of things and running lots of different errands. Wound up spending most of the day helping out with various parts of a strange transfer out to Willy, and never managed to get a Herman Nelson out to Willy despite driving there and back about 1.5 times. Shuffled people around, picked up a few drums of contaminated snow, helped clean up the mess a leaking crane made, picked up keys (we lock some of the main valves) and other small stuff from the barn, etc. The transfer was strange because we nearly finished off one of our bulk AN8 tanks, so we had to shutdown halfway through and work for a while to get the lines primed for pulling fuel out of the second one. Tomorrow we will use a much smaller pump to get the last little bits out of the very nearly empty bulk tank since we're anticipating either running out of AN8 or getting very close to it. Just one inch of fuel in the bulk tanks equates to about 5,000 (yeah, I had put 50,000 earlier by accident, oops!) gallons of fuel, so it's worth spending a little effort saving that last bit to to get a few more fuel flights to pole.

Repairs on the Krasin seem to be moving along, sounds like there might be some issues along the lines of "square peg round hole," except that the peg is the shaft the prop is supposed to fit onto. The Palmer was 10 miles out from town about 5pm this evening, progressing at 8 knots (~9.2mph,) but it's now 10:30pm and it's still not here unless it came in like 10 minutes ago. If the Palmer makes it all the way into McMurdo under it's own power, that's a very good sign, but many people don't think it can do it. Apparently, although the Palmer is built for working in icy water it's not well suited for it and is rather underpowered. Par for the course I suppose.

Spent most of the evening doing chores in my room, watching the last half of a movie, and writing some postcards and emails. Pretty average day!

Me getting a stubborn 2" pipe fitting out of a broken handpump housing yesterday. Took a 160 pound person bouncing on the end of a 4 foot monkey wrench to do the trick, but the trick was done! What could cause such a stubborn fitting? A setscrew!
Ian and a 4 foot monkey wrench

<< Home