Refrigerate After Opening

What a long, strange trip it's been!

2006-03-06T20:56:00.000+13:00

So, I suppose this will be my closing post to this journal. I'm now traveling around New Zealand with my one of my friends from another adventure, Clair. We've been having a great time over the last few days, and it's looking like it'll only be getting better once we actually can get out backpacking (been on the road mostly thus far.) I've been off the ice for a week today, really hard to explain how it feels so I'm not going to try. The adventure in Antarctica was a good one, it definitely taught me a lot of new things and changed my outlook on others. I've been asked a few times already whether I'd do it again, the short answer is 'probably' although it's quite a bit more complex if you want more than a single word answer.

A lot has happened since October that never made it into this journal, and isn't going to. Some of that stuff is related to personal relationships and the like that I wouldn't want to post to everyone online, other bits of it are things that wouldn't exactly be appropriate for the likes of management or children (the line between between the two is sometimes a bit blurry eh?.) Regretfully, in the act of measuring my words here, I know that I've leaned towards being a bit dry at times. Regardless, its been fun to keep up with posting the news, pictures, random thoughts and then getting feedback from friends, family, and even occasionally people I've never met. Thanks for following along!

-Ian-

2006-03-01T12:06:00.000+13:00

I'm in Christchurch! More later.

2006-02-28T10:51:00.000+13:00

How to get a room full of weather delayed ice people all excited:

Unless this flight boomerangs, this will be my last post from the ice this season. Will put up an update from chch!

2006-02-28T08:15:00.000+13:00

Still in McMurdo! The flight yesterday was put on 24 hour weather delay because of some funky weather that drifted over the roads and runway. Would have written a post sooner, but incidentally the IT people were working on the bandwidth upgrade project and all our off-continent comms stuff was down for most of the day. Think I watched more TV/movies yesterday than I had all season previous to that. Hopefully, we'll be taking off from Pegasus in about 5 hours from now and getting to CHCH in about 11...

My last day in Mactown, and likely the last posting from the ice

2006-02-26T14:24:00.000+13:00

Mixed emotions about leaving, the possibility of coming back someday, getting ready to go traveling with friends, and leaving other friends behind. The station feels really quiet to me today, although there's a lot happening on an individual level for most of us here. It's a Sunday with a bit of a storm going on outside. Everyone within thousands of miles except for the 85 of us who will be leaving on the C-17 tomorrow is wintering over, and many of the winterovers are busy getting settled into their new rooms. Those of us who are leaving are getting our last packing done, trickling through the MCC (Movement Control Center) doing bag drag, and saying generally quiet goodbyes to our winterover friends who we won't be seeing until August at the very earliest, or never again at the latest.

Practically speaking, the redeployment process begins with your last day of work. Depending on what your job is down here, you will have to return some tools, make some notes for your replacement, or take care of special tasks possibly. Generally speaking, the last day of work will be a couple days before your flight back to New Zealand, but in some cases (as in cargo, where the last people out sometimes load their own plane) you can actually end up working to get your own flight home back to where it's going. Next, you'll usually have at least one day off to pack up your stuff and get ready to go. First, you'll have to "bag drag," which is a process where you gather all your stuff that you'll be taking back, put it on your body or into baggage, and haul everything up to MCC to get it weighed and checked in. We're required to wear ECW (extreme cold weather - basically the red parka, some warm pants, and our issue (bunny or FDX) boots) gear on the flight home, so you've got to have that on for bag drag, and you're allowed a carryon (and additional laptop bag if you've got a lappy,) and checked baggage totaling no more than 75 pounds (more for winterovers.) At bag drag, you will be weighed in along with all your gear, which is necessary for calculating fuel loads and such for the airplane. Checked bags will be left at MCC, where the cargo folks will put them on pallets and net them down, then transport the pallet(s) of baggage out to the airstrip and load it into the plane before it leaves. It's important to remember to keep a change of regular clothes and anything else that you'll need in your carryon bag because if the flight is delayed for whatever reason, you won't get your checked bags back unless the delay will be a couple days! Around the same time that bag drag is going on, the housing department will send a person around who inspects your room to verify that it's clean and ready for a new occupant. On the same day as bag drag, you head over to the finance office (in building 155, where the galley is) and pick up your travel fund, which is $200 USD in either cash or traveler's checks. Once all this stuff is done, you take care of any little errands and spend your last evening in McMurdo! The next morning, you keep an eye on "the scroll," which is a closed circuit TV channel with important information, including when "transport time" (the time to show up at MCC for the shuttle to the airfield) for your flight is. You get to MCC before your transport time wearing ECW gear and carrying your carryon bag, wait around for a while, then head out of the building through a crowd of people saying goodbye, climb into a vehicle (Ivan the terrabus, a PAX delta, an airporter, or a van most likely,) ride out to the airfield (Pegasus for C17s,) load into the plane, and you're off! In Christchurch you'll go through NZ customs as usual, get a ride from the airport to the CDC (clothing distribution center - epicenter of the USAP in chch) where you'll return all your issue clothing (except for my 5 pairs of totally worn out gloves that I threw out instead of carrying them back;) ,) maybe pick up any items you left for safekeeping, catch a shuttle to your room for the night, drop off your stuff, then head out for a made-to-order meal and some fresh smells and faces!

So, at this point I've packed up all my stuff that's leaving, and put a few other things into skua (take a penny/leave a penny, but for general stuff) and left a few items in the fuels barn in case I end up back down here at some point, with instructions to put them in skua at a certain date if they're still around. I've made some phone calls home to talk with family, written some emails, picked up my travel fund, written this post, and cleaned up my room. My bag drag time is in 45 minutes or so, then I'll be hanging out with friends, heading off to dinner, then to a (raging, most likely) going away party at Hotel California. It's storming a little bit outside, I suppose there's a chance that the flight will be delayed tomorrow, so we might all be spending anything between a few more hours to a few more days in McMurdo, we'll see what happens!

Winding down

2006-02-24T19:33:00.000+13:00

The last few days have been really busy as usual, but lots of fun and we've completed an amazing amount of work!

The hose reeling crews yesterday ended up getting just about all of the Willy hose rolled up last night, and the morning crew had the rest done well before lunch today so essentially the project took a day and a half - super fast! At one point Doc even had the evening reeling hose onto two different trailers simultaneously, which I don't think we had ever done before. Instead of working on the hose rolling, I spent yesterday morning running Scharen out to Pegasus to fuel up some things out there, then the evening was dedicated to breaking down the fuel pits. We made a bunch of progress with shutting down the fuel pits in the evening, then finished it up today. Both Bodie and Patrick had their birthdays yesterday, so we had a fun party at Bodie's place to finish the evening! Think tonight I'll go visit with my friend Cindy at the coffee house to chat about Mongolia, where she spent several years teaching for the Peace Corps. Might wander over to "Hut 10" (something approximating a normal house that we have here for special DV [distinguished visitors] or to check out for parties and get-togethers) after that for another going-away party too. We'll see!

Had a really random small-world sort of experience the other day that I forgot to mention on here. A few days ago one of my DA (diningroom assistant) friends mentioned to me that there was a new winterover DA who had heard about my AT talk and wanted to track me down to say hey. Turns out it was Streetrod (real name Rachael I think,) who is a 2004 AT backpacker that I did a 'shakedown' with when I was working at Neels Gap! At Neels Gap we would, for free, go through a new hikers backpack with them to talk about gear stuff, backpacking techniques, logistical stuff, and whatever randomly came up. So, it's a fun, informative, and relatively unique service where we (the staff) often end up getting to know customers a little bit, and it turns out one of those backpackers I worked with ended up finding a job down here and remembered who I was! Really weird to randomly bump into someone you know from a totally different time and place without having a clue that it was going to happen. Nice surprise!

Finally, my redeployment date has moved semi-officially to the 27th, so I need to get rolling and pack up all my stuff! (not too much, we've got a 75 pound checked baggage weight limit to adhere to. Fortunately, your carryon doesn't count towards that weight ;)

The crew has been in really good spirits lately too, which is especially nice when we're all working very hard and things are already going smoothly. Lots of good humor, friendly jokes, silly pranks, etc. going around. For instance, a funny conversation blip:

Setting the stage:Scott is congratulating the crew for our fantastic job pigging the Willy line. Seth is in the meeting with everyone else, but was one of two or three fuelies who was working on normal town duties instead of pigging.
Seth:I'd like you all to know that I'll gladly take credit for the success with the hose rollup, thank you Scott.
Scott:No, thank you Seth, we couldn't have done it without you.
pause
Scott:Couldn't have done it without you being far, far away [grin].
Applause, laughter

2006-02-22T19:27:00.000+13:00

So I've been a bit too busy and distracted lately to post any updates, will try and get you guys caught up on the big stuff with this post!

The last week has mostly blended together into one long stretch of working and going away parties. Nothing too remarkable happened at work; basically the usual town crew tasks, a little post-boat cleanup stuff, and a bit of preparation for the end of the season. Our two winterover fuelies, Jennifer and Eric, have arrived (actually about two weeks ago, but think I forgot to mention that here,) which has added some fun new conversation and fresh humor to the crew. Matt and Wendy have left for New Zealand, which is kind of a bummer, but it definitely did help me realize just how close the end of the season is getting! There was a fair amount of speculation and anticipation going around last week regarding when the weather at pole would turn cold and keep the LC-130s from flying - and starting the pole winter season. The last pole flight finally left Willy field for Pole early yesterday (Tuesday) morning and returned later in the day, so we've shifted into high gear closing down the airfield end of fuels. The pole closing has pretty much set the date of the last flight out of McMurdo to February 28th, although it's sounding increasingly like that date's going to be moved uop to the 27th. So, if all goes as it's sounding like it will, I might be spending Monday evening at the Dux De Lux in Christchurch!

This week has been pretty busy so far. I've been a little under the weather with general exhaustion and a lingering throat bug that hasn't been bad, but not too fun either. Didn't end up staying up to watch the first sunset Sunday night, probably a good thing! The sun has actually been setting behind some of the bigger mountains for several days anyhow, which looks much the same.

Spent the better part of Monday getting two Challenger trailers (think semi trailers, but with rubber tracks instead of wheels) loaded up with four reels and bases on each. Basically the same process as what Matt and I went through to get the reels loaded up for laying out the Willy hose, except this time we loaded empty reels and installed electric drive motors on some of the bases for rolling up the hose. We had a forklift and operator on loan to do the lifting, then Brian, Chris, and I gathered up a whole bunch of chains and binders to secure the bases to the trailers. Fun stuff! In the evening I started gathering up parts for a new tool that Bodie waned me to build for the Willy hose rollup.

Yesterday (Tuesday) mostly went towards the hose roller project - it's basically a big roller mounted on a pedestal that's attached to a wooden pallet. The idea is that this device will allow us to drag a mostly empty hose across something with a slightly higher elevation than the surrounding snowfield to consolidate any remaining fuel all into one end where it's easier to drain out. I built the roller out of a plastic hose spool that's about 18" wide, made a flange from some scrap plate steel, and an axle from extra steel pipe we had lying around. Reinforced the spool with strategically located screws and plywood, and David helped by building the base with an old pallet and some scrap lumber. It's pretty neat what you can build with an industrial camp's waste stuff at your fingertips! Tuesday evening was my friend Hilary's birthday, and a bunch of people's last day at work (including hers,) so of course we all ended up at Gallagher's socializing as has been usual for the last week or two. What was unusual was that this time my friend Mike found a gingerbread house kit, so a few of us ended up building a gingerbread house in the bar - quite a funny experience! Unfortunately nobody involved had a camera, so you guys will just have to take my word for it :/.

Today we pigged the Willy hose, started rolling it up, then some of us got started with breaking down the Willy fuel pits. There are only two LC130s left on the continent and they will be leaving for the season tomorrow morning, so we won't be fueling any more planes out at Willy until well into the next Summer season here! The pigging operation - where we shoot a foam bullet through the hose with a gigantic air compressor - went super smoothly and apparently left us with a very dry line (good thing.) My job was to drive the chaser vehicle (the Pisten Bully) and try to keep up with the pig so that we would know where it was and be able to keep track of how the operation was going. Fun stuff! In case you haven't been following along for the last few months, Pisten Bullys are one of my favorite vehicles down here - they're nifty tracked vehicles that are intended to be used for things like grooming ski trails, but end up getting used as versatile utility vehicles when it's necessary to drive over completely ungroomed or mushy surfaces. Managed to keep up with the pig all the way to the 48th connection on the hose (out of roughly 60,) which is a lot farther than we usually manage to keep up ;) You can tell where the pig (the foam rubber bullet) is because it gets momentarially stuck in each connection before the compressor builds up enough pressure to squeeze it through. When the pig pops through a connection, the hose in that area recoils, or on occasion even jumps several feet into the air! Today it didn't go airborne, but it was pretty impressive to see some of the connections violently wiggling around on the ground for a second as the ~150psi air forced a bunch of fuel and foam rubber to move around really quickly! The drive was fun, a neat blend of making up a strategy on the fly and spending as much time focused on the hose as possible while still driving in a sane manner over sometimes rough snow. We were done with the pigging by lunchtime, and from what we can tell at this point, we did an exceptionally good job overall and there is very very little fuel left in the hose. Sometimes things don't go so well and the pig disentegrates or doesn't always make a good seal so some fuel gets left in the hose, which is a pain during the rolling process. After lunch I helped get things setup for the hose rolling, then went out to the fuel pits to start taking them apart for the winter. By the time we quit, the hose reeling crew had gotten two full reels of hose done and had only draned a gallon or two of fuel out of the ~1 mile of hose involved - other times that would be more on the order of a couple hundred gallons!

Tomorrow I'm not sure exactly what I'll end up doing - I'm not on one of the hose rolling crews, so it could be anything between working in the lab or working on breaking down the pits, we'll see!

Polar Star in the turning basin		My friends Kish, Cheri, and Sky at their last band practice
A nice example of Fata Morgana distorting a small island on the horizon. Willy hose is in the foreground		Hope (fuels GA and fellow MMI resident) photographing one of our first sunsets
The last LC-130 of the season flying north		The pig we launched through the willy hose - after traveling through about 5 miles of hose

2006-02-19T15:16:00.000+13:00

Q:Subject: No Blog Postings
Body: My God Skittles, did the talk about the AT go really really badly? Are you OK? -Morph

A:Hey Morph! Nope, the AT talk actually went really well, just been busy and too worn out to put together any new blog posts. Ended up talking about the trail for over two hours, had lots of questions and good crowd interaction, very good time! Several people down here have plans to hike the AT within the next year or two, so they had some very insightful questions and observations that made things stay interesting.

There's been a string of going away parties down here for the last week or so, which has left me pretty wiped out. Station is getting pretty quiet, think we're going to be under the 500 people mark after tomorrow's flight leaves. Winterovers are getting moved into their new rooms (they get a whole room to themselves over the winter, but have to share during summer,) and those of us who are leaving are working on travel plans. I have today off, so it'll be good for getting some recovery time in.

About to go visit with some friends who are leaving tomorrow, might get around to taking care of laundry and getting my things packed up in preperation for leaving in a week or less. The first sunset of the year will happen tonight (technically early tomorrow morning,) so I'm very tempted to stay up for that, which will inevitably lead to a groggy Ian at work tomoorrow, but that's nothing new (for me or most of the station) over the last couple weeks ;).

2006-02-15T08:05:00.000+13:00

Yesterday we did fuel the icebreaker Polar Star, which ended up going really quick and smoothly. After some negotiations (which started after we started pumping,) it was decided that the boat would only be taking on 200,000 gallons of fuel, so the transfer ran quite a lot faster than we had anticipated it would. Had super nice weather too! At one point I was stationed up in the pass to keep an eye on the pump we were using (a three cylinder Deutz - small version of what we use at the runways,) and monitor the fuel level in the bulk tank. Rather than just sitting on the pipeline staring at the pump I ended up just laying on top of the tank in the warm sun staring at the horizon and watching the happenings in town.

Once the transfer was done, we got things shut down and cleaned up, then got to go on a tour of the icebreaker! Unfortunately, my camera ended up staying in the barn all day so I don't have any pictures of the boat. The Polar Star has a little store/gift shop, so I did manage to pick up some souvenir type items and a few candy bars that we don't generally have on station. As we were leaving for the day, Bodie told me I could take tomorrow (now today) off work as a comp day, so I naturally ended up staying out a bit late visiting with friends, some of whom will be leaving today (then tomorrow.)

The plan for today is to put together an alcohol stove to show to some people, make some phone calls, and work on getting the AT presentation that I'll finally be giving tomorrow! More later? We'll see!

Monday night update

2006-02-13T23:36:00.000+13:00

Busy day for me - not exactly breakneck pace, but I was busy working on one thing or another from walking in the door until an hour and a half afer we're supposed to get done. Big change from sitting around at Willy waiting for airplanes to stop by and take fuel! Started out the morning with a transfer to fuel the powerplant with Seth, which involved a little standing scree/rock glissade where I accidentally smashed my radio (we all carry handheld VHF walkie talkies on the job - handy and tough little buggers!) Fortunately, it turned out that we had a couple broken ones back in the barn, including one that had gotten dropped in salt water - the electronics were fried but the plastic shell was good! Put together a working radio from the good parts, then fixed some other little tools and things around the barn while waiting for the powerplant transfer to get done.

We're anticipating the Polar Star will arrive late tonight and take on fuel tomorrow - 500,000 gallons of fuel to one boat! Doc and I spent a fair amount of the day getting setup for that operation, did several little things that would be hard to explain quickly. Then this afternoon we had some weather blow in which resulted in a couple LC130s being diverted to Pegasus, where for whatever reason the visibility was much better than at Willy. Usually the LC130s stay at Willy, it's a little bit of a hassel to deal with them out at Pegasus. Not that big of a deal, but we had did have to quickly shuffle a couple people from Willy out to Pegasus and replace the missing Willy people with town crew, so although I was on town crew I spent the last few hours of the day out at Willy. The Twin Otters have now all left, so we'll only be dealing with LC130s and C17s from now on! For the first time in a few weeks, I managed to have a regular breakfast, lunch, and dinner - and all at the same place!

The lighting is getting all pretty again!

2006-02-11T02:07:00.000+13:00

The tanker is offloaded and cleanup has begun! Things went incredibly smoothly once we finally had the ship tied up at the ice pier. Through much of the process, I was working with Matt fueling planes at Willy, taking care of fuel deliveries with Delta Scharen, or subbing in for regular tanker crew so that they could eat meals. Moved something on the order of 7 million gallons of fuel over the course of two (24 hour) days! Did manage to check out the deck of the ship as part of the job, but unfortunately I was out of town or busy with cleanup work when they ran the full tours so I didn't get to see the inside at all. Oh well... Polar Star should be coming in at the beginning of next week, that should be neat to see!

Krasin escorting Gianella back out to open water	Deltas have, among other nifty things, escape hatches on the roof!

2006-02-10T02:21:00.000+13:00

The other day I had a good question about how the LC130s can use skis down here, but still manage to land on regular airports with concrete runways. The skis are actually somewhat retractable so the planes can use either the skis or the wheels, sometimes they actually use a little bit of both!

	Rear	Front
Skis up
Skis down

Tanker offload begins!

2006-02-10T01:27:00.000+13:00

What a relief! After all the waiting, speculation, rescheduling, waiting, anticipation, and more waiting - the tanker is here, it's being offloaded, and it's going smoothly! Tanker offload is the single biggest project we have every season in fuels, so it's a pretty complex operation. We have at least 10 people working on offload 24 hours a day until the tanker has delivered our order. For offload, we have at least these positions being occupied at all times, and occasionally (like today when Matt and I got back from Willy,) have extra people on, who generally take care of chores or act as runners:

*Two people in the office coordinating things and keeping logs of the process.

*One person, the sponson, stays on the tanker and helps coordinates between our office (aka 'control') and the ship.

*One person is stationed near five valves at the end of our town pipeline network (the 'hardline') where the hoses to the tanker connect. This person rotates out with the linewalker.

*One person is the linewalker, they basically just walk the same path that the fuel is flowing to inspect the pipeline and all the valves along it. This person rotates out with the person at the pier valves.

*Two people run the four booster pumps, which are big 6 cylinder diesel powered pumps on trailers that help keep the fuel moving up to our bulk tanks, which are at significantly higher elevation than the tanker. The tanker has it's own pumps, but they're not quite powerful enough to move that far uphill at the speeds that we need to move it at.

*Two people are stationed at the pass where they monitor the levels in our bulk tanks and open/close valves as needed.

*Two people (at least) are 'runners,' who basically take care of all the little odds and ends that inevitably pop up. Basically they switch out with other people for bathroom/warmup/meal breaks, deliver tools or food, offer moral support, or take care of whatever random tasks pop up.

Finally, an abbreviated version of what I was up to today:
Matt and I started out with checking out Scharen (we check fluids and visually inspect the vehicles once a day) and filling it up with a load of fuel, drove out to Willy where we split up for a bit. Matt and David (who's on AM pits) took care of Willy pits while John (also AM pits) and I drove Scharen out to Pegasus to fuel up the generator out there. Got back and switched out with David, then Matt and I fueled up a few planes before lunch (dinner for normal people.) Fueled up the generator and a few other things at Willy, then rolled back to Mactown in Delta Scharen. When we got back to McMurdo, tanker offload was chugging smoothly along. They had already pumped well over a million gallons of jet fuel and had (I believe, not positive though) finished up with pumping our mogas (regular unleaded gasoline) order. While we were out at Willy, the Krasin had pulled in beside the Gianella. Matt, Lisa, Jennifer (one of our two winterovers who just arrived a few days ago,) and I ran around to help making people comfortable in their various posts around town - delivered hot water, tea, snacks, sleeping bags, etc. Spent a fair amount of time checking up on potential issues that our offload helper GAs had found, but thankfully didn't run across anything to be concerned about. Subbed in with people so that they could get a break to eat midrats (lunch, but for nightshift people,) ate dinner, then got to the computer kiosk.

2006-02-09T00:10:00.000+13:00

So, here's a modified satellite image showing the general area around Ross Island, which is where McMurdo is, and iceberg C-16's movement over the last several days. It'll be interesting to see what the iceberg does over the next year or two because unless it blows out to sea (north,) it'll most likely have a big impact on the sea ice conditions around here. In this image, the shipping channel is shown as a dotted black line extending from McMurdo (near the south tip of Ross Island) to open water (black.) That shipping channel is the lifeline of McMurdo (and South Pole since it's supported from here,) so if the iceberg stays around and has a negative impact on the shipping channel, it could cause some major problems for getting ships in and out of McMurdo.

And, the big news of the morning, TANKER OFFLOAD HAS BEGUN!!! Sounds like they've been pumping AN8 for an hour or two, and the JP5 offload just got rolling. I just woke up, so am going to get some food then head up to the barn to see what's shakin'.

What could go wrong?

2006-02-07T22:25:00.000+13:00

There have been some more delays with the cargo vessel offload that are going to push the tanker schedule back another day or two. Some weather related stuff (wind,) some mechanical stuff (crane broke,) and maybe a little user malfunction thrown in for good measure. At any rate, it's looking like we might get tanker offload started Wednesday evening if we're lucky, which puts us getting done with it Saturday night under optimal conditions. With the way things down here have been going recently, my gut feeling is that things won't go quite that smoothly and we'll be working all weekend...

And, if we're working all weekend (or into next week,) the odds that I'll end up PM pits for week #6 (double checked, this is #5) aren't too bad!

But wait! There's more! Completely out of the blue, this big iceberg named C16 started moving on Jan 28 and over the last week has swung around and moved through a relatively tight gap between some islands to nearly block off the open end of the shipping channel! Don't have any pictures handy to post, but have seen some and it's pretty unbelievable. This berg just sat still for quite a while before executed a very precise, unlikely, and potentially incredibly inconvenient little dance over to it's current position over just a few days. Will C16 block off the channel? If it does, will it do it after the ships are out of here? Interesting stuff! Think I'm going to wait a bit on posting the potentially dire consequences for dramatic effect, and to see what happens over the next couple days.

On a lighter note, we hit the bottom of our AN8 supply in town today, a little bit earlier than expected, but only by a couple thousand gallons. So, all our usable AN8 is now in the tanks out at Willy and Pegasus. We've been shuttling fuel back from Pegasus to Willy in the tanker sleds, and should have just enough AN8 to scrape by until tanker offload is done if cargo vessel offload goes well and if we can get the tanker offloaded smoothly and if the flights to pole take relatively light loads over the next several days. It's a major pain (and a kind of sketchy process) to send fuel out to Willy when we're offloading the tanker because of how the town fuel system is setup, but that's an option that I'm sure will be considered. Otherwise the choice is between sending out some JP5 to Willy or running the risk of the airfield going dry. Neither of the three options are pretty!

So, that's all I've got for tonight!

2006-02-07T01:02:00.000+13:00

Funky weather today out at Willy (wind chill -14f in town,) just barely good enough to keep the airfield open. At one point as I stood waiting for a plane to begin fueling, snow drifts started forming leading off from my boots! Fortunately, Matt and I stayed occupied and had a pretty good time - much better to go into "grin and bear it" mode than just complain about the weather! A bunch of new guys with the national guard came in over the weekend, so today was the first workday for several of them. What an introduction to working in Antarctica! Of course I did my best to play down the nasty weather as being just a little worse than average to mess with them, but I'm sure they figured out what was up quickly enough.

After getting in from work a bit early, I hung out in the MMI (my dorm) lounge munching on snacks and chatting for a bit. Once that crowd all went to bed so I walked over to the galley for midrats (lunch for the nightshift people, dinner for me) complete with some great humor centering around how twisted our minds have all become after working on the ice. Laughed so hard my stomach hurt, but eventually we had to disperse so people could go back to work, and I could get on the computer for a little bit of typing.

Weekend Update

2006-02-06T00:24:00.000+13:00

All things considered, the station has been really quiet over the last few days. It's been overcast with occasional snow and wind, nothing major but it definitely puts a damper on things. Windchills (which have a lot more bearing on comfort than raw temperatures) are generally between 0 and -10f lately. Not too bad, but I'm not running around town in my sandals anymore. The attitude around town is an uncomfortable blend of anticipation, quiet nostalgia, frustration, relief, uncertainty, exhaustion, and nervous energy as things both get really busy and start winding down simultaneously. Along with vessel offload, there have been a few flights full of people heading back to warmer climes. Hundreds more people will be leaving over the next few weeks, including a few friends who have really helped shape my experience down here.

The cargo vessel has been offloaded and is now being filled back up with all the garbage (aka "retro") from here and South Pole to go back home to the states. Reloading the cargo vessel is supposed to take a bit longer than unloading it did since the shipping containers ("cans" for short) have to be arranged on the ship rather than just being quickly plucked out. Some areas around station are cordoned off for staging and distributing cargo, more people are on nightshift, and there's a bit more traffic around town than usual, but other than that not a whole lot is different in town from my perspective. The fuel tanker made it in to the turning basin on Saturday where it's waiting for it's turn at the ice pier. The current plan is that the cargo ship should get done sometime around Tuesday or Wednesday, it'll pull out from the pier to be replaced by the tanker, which we will then offload over the course of the following three days or so. South Pole has enough fuel for the winter, so although we might still run out of AN8 before the tanker is offloaded, it won't be as of a deal since the remaining flights will be transporting people and cargo and can just as easily run on the JP5 that we have plenty of.

So, that's the big picture of what's happening. On a more personal note, I worked Saturday at the fuel pits as usual, but unusually was able to get out of the pits a little early since there weren't any planes needing fuel after 6pm or so. Missed the shuttle back to McMurdo by a minute or two, but got lucky and got a ride back with some DA (dining room assistant) friends of mine who were running the Willy Galley. Spent the first part of the evening hanging around at the coffee house (my home away from home when I can make it,) then a typical only-in-McMurdo style spontaneous party erupted around 9 or 10pm and went on to sometime Sunday morning. Woke up this morning (noon for everyone else, still in swing shift mode) downed a half gallon of water (it's unbelievably dry here for being on the coast, although I guess the sea is frozen over...,) then walked over to the galley to grab brunch. Unfortunately I found that due to those pesky boats we would be having a mediocre lunch of pulled pork sandwiches and various fried things (funny aside - the galley guys actually wrote "various fried things" on the menu board a week or two ago, thought that was funny) instead of the tasty brunch that I've somehow managed to miss for the last few weeks. Oh well. Hung out at the coffee house, did laundry, borrowed a laptop and talked trail stuff with my friend Delaney, spent some time on the computer, watched the tail end of a movie, and generally had a mellow, lazy day.

Haven't confirmed this with Bodie, but it sounds like I'll be on PM pits for this week since we'll be doing tanker offload, which I'm not too excited about but will deal with. Have been on PM pits for something like 6 weeks (normally we have a single (AM or PM) 2 or 3 week rotation at pits per season) and am frankly sick of the schedule that goes with it and doing practically the same thing for days straight. As we say all too often - It's a harsh continent.

2006-02-04T20:08:00.000+13:00

"Attention all fuelies, attention all fuelies. There is a fuel tanker in the turning basin."

"...floating?"

2006-02-03T01:14:00.000+13:00

Today was a little more calm than yesterday, but it wasn't entirely without incident! Walked in to breakfast this morning to find that the cargo ship had nudged (slight understatement) the ice pier a little bit - moved the entire thing (that's a BIG chunk of ice) about 10 feet and broke the bridge to it in the process. As you might guess, cargo vessel offload took a while to get started while they got the bridge repaired.

Fortunately, I was mostly isolated from all the chaos around town while working the pits out at Willy with Matt again. We ended up fueling 8 planes; 4 LC130s and 4 Twin Otters. Two of the Otters were leaving for the season, which means an 8(?) leg trip for them from McMurdo to South Pole to Rothera to Chile, then bouncing through a few places I can't remember to get to Houston (or was it Austin...) then home base in Calgary. Sounds like an interesting, although long, trip to me! It finally sunk in today that the season is drawing to a close and I'll likely never see a lot of my friends from here again when the two Otters left. Wally and Brian, the crew of one of the planes, walked across the pits (I was taking care of an LC130 at the time) to shake hands and say their goodbyes before they took off. It's a bittersweet feeling, but I'm ready to go and get on with whatever will come next.

A tilted picture of an LC-130 landing in front of Black Island with a garden variety Fata Morgana on the horizon.	Matt fueling the same LC-130 a few minutes later. At the same time, cargo is loading it with a pallet train (several pallets stuck together to hold big items.)

The American Tern getting started with offload

Crazy day!

2006-02-02T00:47:00.000+13:00

First thing this morning I found out that the Kaptain K (the tour ship/icebreaker that was going to save the day) had decided to back out on the deal they had with the USAP to help us getting ships in, so that was an out-of-nowhere sort of surprise!

The implications of the Kaptian K quitting were of course potentially pretty serious and far reaching, so much of the idle time out at Willy was spent speculating on what those implications would be. The plan as Matt and I left McMurdo was that the Krasin would attempt to bring in the Tern (cargo vessel) to test the waters, if they made it in the Tern would sit in the turning basin while the Krasin brought the tanker in to get it's offload started, and we'd take things from there.

The pits were pretty laid back fortunately - just fueled three skiers in relatively rapid succession, ate dinner (my lunch,) then headed back into town. Matt and I arrived back in town and saw that the cargo vessel had arrived, so that was a slightly surprising good sign! We walked into the barn as a meeting was breaking up where the crew had found out that the cargo vessel was actually going to be unloading first! That was a bit of a surprise, and meant that we'd have to go drain and roll up the hoses that we had staged on the ice pier for offloading the tanker. So, everyone was rushing around the barn gathering up tools, parts, clothes, etc. and generally getting things moving in an organized frenzy. Matt and I walked into the office to figure out what was going on and where we fit into the picture right about the same time Scott (the fuels director) got a phone call saying that the tanker Capitan had decided they would just give it a shot and try to get in, so we would probably be offloading the tanker first.

Several phone and radio calls, and a few minutes later everyone was back in the office in a second meeting to figure out what would be the best course of action now that we needed to be ready to either clean up the pier or start offload on short notice. We worked out a different plan, then dispersed to move forward with it.

Within a few minutes, another phonecall came in - we would be unloading the cargo vessel first and had to have the ice pier clean by 8am! So, that became the official plan and we got rolling. Chris and I jumped on Delta Scharen to go find tanks we could drain her fuel load into so that we could suck out the pier hoses, which included some very tight precision driving to get the delta up to a big tank that had some space in it (used for heating several of the dorms, but we usually fill it with the considerably smaller Fule Mule.) Got that done, then rolled down to the ice pier and began sucking hoses down and packing them away in a corner of the pier so they wouldn't interfere with cargo offload. In the meantime, other people were getting things staged to pig the mogas line, and a big crowd of navchaps showed up out of nowhere. Navchaps are a Navy port logistics group that gets brought down every season to help out with vessel offload - they've been really bored lately since they came down nearly two weeks ago and the vessel still hasn't come in. I'm still not clear on how they knew to show up, but they did and were very helpful with 'flaking' (folding in a tight zigzag pattern) the hoses up, which is usually a bit of a workout.

Eventually it was time for midrats, so we all got things to a good stopping point and went to the galley to eat. Matt and I are done for the day now, but everyone else is out there pigging the line at this point and will be getting the last bits of pier cleanup done over the next few hours. Assuming things go as planned, the cargo vessel offload will begin at 8am tomorrow morning, chaos will ensue, and 5 days later we should have the fuel vessel pulling in to finally get our fuel shipment delivered.

If things go as currently planned, we're going to run out of AN8 before the tanker gets unloaded, so I'd imagine that will cause some chaos. Sounds like we do have enough AN8 on station to satisfy the needs of south pole, so that's a very very good thing! Given how quickly plans have been changing lately, I'd say there's a decent chance that we could even end up offloading the tanker tomorrow. Will just have to see how things play out and keep this thing updated!

A few nightshift fuelies and a bunch of Navchaps finishing up with cleaning our hoses off the ice pier. The water/ice in the foreground is what the cargo vessel and fuel tanker will have to move through! Big orange tanker truck is Scharen, which is being used to suck up the fuel that the two teams of people are walking out of a section of hose.

2006-01-30T23:42:00.000+13:00

Relatively painless day back at the pits - working with Matt again until we're done with the tanker offload, so that's cool. Just had two LC130s and one twin otter to fuel. Fortunately, the planes lined up nicely such that we were able to grab dinner at Willy, pack up, and head home. Once back in town, we helped out with a few little projects to get set for tanker; drained some fuel out of the dive team's generator so they could fly it home, erected a little windbreak for the person who stands by some valves, and moved a big heater over to the booster pumps.

Things are finally moving again with the ship situation. FESCO decided to run on a three bladed prop rather than removing the opposite blade. Krasin left town yesterday night and escorted the Palmer into the ice pier this evening. The Palmer has offloaded some waste, switched out crew, and should be leaving within the next several hours with Krasin blazing a path out. Krasin and the Kapitan Khlebnikov (the Russian icebreaker/tour ship) will work together to bring in the Gianella (tanker.) Hopefully tanker offload will finally get rolling tomorrow so we won't run out of AN8 afterall.

Nathaniel B Palmer parked at the ice pier, which is a bit hard to see in this picture since it's made of rock and ice just like everything around it, plus the ship is in the foreground. The open water by the Palmer was cleared out by plowing all the ice near the pier into a corner with Krasin, most of the shipping channel looks like the icy mush in front of the ship.

2006-01-29T14:22:00.000+13:00

Saturday was an interesting day at work, the night shift people have begun transitioning to nights, so we were basically half staffed. Had to do a Willy transfer, which pretty much occupied all but one of us all day long. Had a couple volunteers, a janitor and a DA (dining room assistant,) helping out, so that was fun and it definitely helped out with the job. Ended up staying up super late with Trevor, who's transitioning to nights, cleaning up Gallaghers after a big party, playing cribbage, drinking coffee, and visiting with friends. Had a good time, but stayed up a bit too late - went to bed about 5am. I'm switching back to a noon to midnight type shift for working the Willy pits with Matt during tanker offload, so I need to be going to bed sometime around 3am instead of 5. Whatever.

Inside our tiny hydroponic greenhouse - the plants in the foreground are actually just as green as the others, seems that my camera doesn't like the grow lights in that room so the colors are distorted.

Sunday's been relaxed as usual thus far, had the normal waffle brunch, sat around visiting for a couple hours, took care of some chores including posting to the old journal!

It's looking like I'm going to have to delay the AT presentation for another week since I'll probably be working next Thursday night when it's currently scheduled. Fortunately, Ben has a presentation ready to go that he's willing to do on a moment's notice, so if anything comes up he can fill in my spot and I'll do it the following week. Didn't get my box of stuff mailed, so I'll likely have to just carry it out as part of my baggage on the flight back to Christchurch. Oh well.

Got this email today and figured some people might find it useful:

FYI-

The Denver Job Fair will be held on Friday April 7th from 10am-7pm at the RPSC headquarters in Centennial.

Thanks,
Andrea

Andrea Dixon
Sr. HR Generalist
McMurdo Station
Raytheon Polar Services Co.

2006-01-27T21:57:00.000+13:00

Nice day off! Spent much of the day working on a presentation about the Appalachian Trail that I'm doing next Thursday. Also read a lot, took care of laundry, bought some souvenir type items to try to mail out tomorrow, and generally enjoyed my day off. Tomorrow is the last day that we're able to send package mail out from here, so the odds are against me being able to track down a box, pack my stuff up, wait in line, and mail it out during work hours - especially since tomorrow will likely be a busy day and several people will be transitioning to nights and therfore not working.

The plan is to bring the fuel tanker in Sunday or Monday, we'll see how it goes.

2006-01-26T22:19:00.000+13:00

Interesting day at work today, was working outside all day in the pass where it was rather windy and chilly. High temp was 28F, low wind chill was -8F, wind gusting around 40mph in town but likely a bit higher in the pass. Seemed like I could have used a bucket and a rope as a kite sometimes. Was working with Seth on getting the last bit of fuel in one of our bulk tanks moved to the one left that has any significant amount of fuel in it. The transfer we did was kind of fun since it's not something that happens very often (every few years,) so I basically got to go figure out how to set everything up, then follow through with my plan rather than a well established routine like most of our transfers. Also helped Doc with setting up a secondary pump to help prime our pumphouse for when we have to get the last bits out of our one remaining tank. Watched a couple of the heavy shop mechanics working on one of the big electric pumps in the pumphouse, which was interesting and informative. They were aligning the pump itself with the gearbox that drives it and the motor that drives the gearbox. Learned some neat new things about precision industrial mechanics and some generally nifty little tricks.

Have tomorrow off work to make up for working the Sunday before last, so that's nice. Watched a really neat presentation on Mongolia after dinner. Lots of cool pictures, fun stories, and good information. Mongolia is a country that I've wanted to visit for a while, so it was neat getting to listen and ask questions about it. Have considered trying to work it into my travel plans for after the ice, but it doesn't seem like there's a way to smoothly integrate it without spending a whole bunch of money on airfare. After the presentation, it was off to the computer to take care of the usual emails and of course this blog post!

Update on the ship situation
So, sounds like the dive team isn't able to attach a replacement blade to the Krasin's broken prop, so right now the question is whether to remove the opposing blade to balance the prop or not. FESCO (Far East Shipping Company,) the company that owns Krasin, has been asked what they want to do and the dive team is waiting for a response. There is another Russian ship (also owned by FESCO, but operated by some travel company) in the area, can't remember it's name but it's Kapitan something-that-starts-with-K. This one is a cruise ship, but it's basically an ice breaker at heart, and fortunately it'll be available to help out with our problems for a couple days. Between this Kapitan whatever and the Krasin, we might be able to bring in one of the supply vessels relatively soon. The Palmer didn't make it in, as the people in-the-know here predicted, and the Polar Star is still on it's way down.

2006-01-25T20:23:00.000+13:00

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!

2006-01-24T20:36:00.000+13:00

Another normal day in McMurdo. Today I was driving Scharen around most of the day fueling things up and finishing up some of the work we did yesterday. We had replaced a couple hundred feet of the hose out to Willy, which is full of fuel, so the section that we cut out up to Scharen to suck out the 300+ gallons of fuel that were left in it before drying the hose out and throwing it in the garbage. When I was driving between Willy and Pegasus, the accelerator pedal stuck down, which isn't the best thing in a ~20 ton truck... Figured out what was going on with it (worn out bushings) when I got back and dropped it off at the heavy shop for them to fix that and a few other small things that were messed up. Spent the rest of the workday kicking around the barn taking care of several incidental tasks. Been writing emails and such most of the evening, about to head over to the coffee house for a bit, then off to bed!

Oh, and this is the 100th post to my journal!

Nice day!

2006-01-23T19:22:00.000+13:00

Nothing terribly exciting, but today was pretty cool. I had to get up at 6am, which seemed super early, but it wasn't too bad. Had my first regular breakfast in the last several weeks, also not too bad. The powdered eggs are edible again, think my tummy just needed a break. Spent pretty much all day working on fixing a few problem spots on the willy hose with Lisa, Kris, and Trevor turned out to be really nice. Good weather, a decent but manageable workload, and everything just worked out really smoothly! Checked my mail after lunch to find three letters including a postcard from my friend Karma who sent it from the Bahamas where he was out sailing! Always nice to hear from friends who are out exploring some distant part of the globe and get some fresh ideas. We were lucky and got to see a young seal that had for some reason decided to wander probably a mile from it's hole to go lay down by our hose:

2006-01-22T13:53:00.000+13:00

Finally, a day off! First day off after working 13 days straight, many of those being 11-12 hour workdays. Not a whole lot of new stuff going on here really. We've got a film festival coming up in an hour or so, which should be interesting. Went to the waste department party last night, it was fun but nothing really special. Tanker's still not in and I don't have any new info on where it's at unfortunately. The town crew went ahead and hooked up the town side of the hoses that will be later be connected to the tanker for offload. Doc, Tonya, Bodie, and I spent part of yesterday evening building a little foot bridge over the hoses so that the Hut Point race that happened this morning could cross them safely. Will be back on the town crew Monday morning, which is something I'm really glad about - more because I'll be getting back on a normal schedule than because of the workload. The weird work schedules down here have been a pretty constant thorn in my side down here since October, hopefully though that'll be done with as soon as tanker offload is over. When the tanker is in, fuels switches to a 24 hour operation for a few days and I'll be working in another swing shift type situation, mostly at Willy, during that.

Did some research on how much AN8 we've got on station, sounds like the number in that long email I posted earlier was correct. His total is pretty much the sum of every drop of AN8 on station including our bulk tanks, aviation tanks at Willy, aviation tanks at Pegasus, and the fuel sitting in our miles of pipelines and hoses. According to Scott (my boss, not Jim Scott,) and he said that if we really had to, we could get all that except for about 140,000 gallons into airplanes bound for pole. So, things are kind of tight. Just wanted to follow up with my personal opinion post from earlier.

2006-01-20T22:34:00.000+13:00

Alrighty, I know this is my third post in like an hour, but I've gotta say this paraphrased conversation was the highlight of my day. This morning (really afternoon, but as Molly observed it's always mornining in McMurdo!) Bodie, Tonya, and I were having our little morning meeting before Tonya and I headed out to the fuel pits. Bodie was going over the (real) morning's safety topic - thermal expansion in fuel pipelines.

Pretty much anywhere else in the world, all the valves on fuel pipelines are built with pressure bypass setups so that any excessive pressure bypasses closed valves and gets vented out to a tank or another fuel line. Whenever fuels engineers from outside come down here and see our system, they're always a combonation of being scared and amazed that we work with what we've got, and don't have all that many problems with it. McMurdo only has one of those pressure bypass valves - it's on the mogas line. The kicker is that one pressure bypass valve, on the mogas line, was installed backwards, so it's not really functional anyhow.

I'm aiming for information overload here

2006-01-20T22:28:00.000+13:00

The (relatively) short of things, by my friend John, who's the South Pole Fuels Foreman:

So the deal is they’re having a hard time cutting the channel through the ice into the McMurdo pier, and its delaying the arrival of the container ship and the fuel tanker. The Russian icebreaker that’s cutting the channel broke down. One of the blades on one of its propellers broke off. They are sending down a dive team, and they plan on cutting off the blade opposite the blade that fell off so the breaker can operate at 75% of full power. McMurdo closes later than the pole, so its not such a big deal for McMurdo if the container ship doesn’t come in on time. But, they can’t fly pole supplies that come in on the container ship down here if it comes in late. So, they are unloading the pole supplies off the container ship in Christchurch, and then flying the stuff down to McMurdo, and then down to pole. Unfortunately the Pole supplies are in the bottom of the container ship, so they have to unload the whole thing, then reload it again.

And as the emails indicate, with the late arrival of the tanker they are running very low on AN8 fuel, which is what we need here at the Pole. AN8 has a low freezing point, whereas JP5 can be used in McMurdo because it doesn’t get as cold. So, they’re running as much as they can on JP5 in McMurdo in order to conserve AN8. We’re getting 7 flights a day down here, and often we get very late flights arriving at 2 or 3 in the morning. And the end of the season is rapidly approaching, so there are employee evaluations to do, end of season reports, fuel numbers to run, etc etc. Too much paperwork, not enough time outside. But, in 5 weeks I’ll be sitting on a warm sunny beach in New Zealand :)

And, the long, more detailed version of things by Jim Scott, McMurdo Area Director

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott, Jim
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2006 11:54 AM
To: Yelvington, Tom; DeMaria, Louis; Grant, BK; Embree, Mike; Kottmeier,
Steve; Chuck, Kerry; Cook, Larry; Taube, Scott; Turnbull, William
Cc: Dormand, Lynn; Carroll, Valerie; Walker, Paula
Subject: Vessel & Ice Channel Update 1-20-06

All:

The situation swings between optimistic to dismal on a 12- to 24-hour
scale. The escort of the GIANELLA to the 21-mile parking spot proceeded
without problems. The KRASIN's first cut through the re-frozen channel
was also encouraging, as the ice from mile 21 to mile 12 was quite easy
and there appeared to be none of the lateral pressure which caused
problems in channel maintenance last week. Now there are number of very
tough segments of the channel, as well as difficulties in the turning
basin.

The KRASIN does not seem to be significantly impeded by the lessened
function of the starboard prop however, the shear volume of the ice in
the channel is staggering. The KRASIN is effective at milling this ice
but the ice chunks, no matter their size, have no where to go and thus
have turned the channel into a thick porridge which the KRASIN continues
to stir.

At 1700 yesterday, the KRASIN, had completed at least four round trips
in the lower channel. Even so, the Captain's are not optimistic about
getting the GIANELLA to the wharf under current conditions without
performing a close-tow (coupled escort). This method is of last resort.
They continue to brainstorm ideas for a workable solution as they
proceed with channel milling.

The Captains believe that an additional icebreaker, unless greater in
the beam than the GIANELLA, will not help much, if at all, in getting
the vessels down the channel and to the ice wharf.

That said, there was a moderate south wind yesterday morning and it
freshened as the day progressed. The outer channel and 5 to 9 miles of
the inner channel are ripe for blow out (or at least becoming pack ice
instead of fast ice).

Assuming the tanker will NOT make it to the pier prior to Feb 8-9 it
appears that there is sufficient quantities of AN-8 to provide Spole
with planned for amounts. As of today, they required 229,833 gallons.
Estimated usage to transport is 600K-650K. The total conservative
number of AN-8 needed is ~880K and McM currently has 1,024,469 gals of
AN-8 remaining.

At this point, it is thought that the tanker will get to the pier, but
maybe not in time to keep from running out of AN-8 in McM. The impacts
in McM are negligible at this time as there is sufficient inventories of
JP-5 and mogas for normal station ops...if the 109th will change over to
JP-5. NSF will be requesting the 109th to change over.

The NBP still requires a port call and it has not yet been figured into
the mix. Discussion today was to ask them to transit the channel to get
a better "feel" of impacts to ship movement. They may be requested to
assist in an escort if feasible.

Divers-

The divers are due in either Sunday or Tuesday and if the Krasin agrees
to repairs onsite, they will be probably be performed early next week.
McM is lining up requested items and support as requested.

Tern-
Due to ice edge on Tuesday, Jan 24th. McM will transition to vessel
shifts on Monday.

NAVCHAPS-
Arrived in McM yesterday, Thursday, Jan 19.

Next update-Jan 21, '06.

Regards,

Jim Scott
McMurdo Area Director

My take on the above things

Icebreaker broke, pole's behind on fuel, the channel's full of chunks of ice, and the tanker still isn't here. We're running really low on AN-8, and will probably be out in roughly two weeks unless the tanker can start offloading before then. The upside is that unless the tanker somehow manages to come in after some time in late March, I'll win the pool at work where we were guessing when the tanker would come in. It pays to be a pessimist sometimes! Not sure where Jim's numbers came from, but I think his outlook is a tad optimistic for two reasons.

First, I don't think we've got a million usable gallons of AN-8 on station unless there's a couple hundred thousand gallons of fuel hiding somewhere that I don't know about. Might be closer to a million gallons if you count the little bit left in the very bottom of our bulk tanks, but since there's no practical way to get it out, it might as well not be there.

Second, there are some practical difficulties in using every drop of AN8 that we have. If we pumped every drop of AN8 out of our bulk tanks to Willy, then pumped everything we could out of the tanks there into airplanes, we would still be approaching 100,000 gallons of AN8 sitting in the pipeline, Willy hose, and the bottom of the aviation tanks. To move that fuel out, we'd have to start pumping out JP5, but -unless I'm mistaken- we couldn't use any of that blend of JP5/AN8 for pole fuel flights anymore as it's gell point would be unknown (since it's a blend,) so it's essentially a loss as far as getting fuel to pole goes. All the pole that gets delivered to pole has to be straight AN8. So, aside from the infrasturcture holding fuel, there's the issue of how to send all the AN8 to pole without sending it other places. The LC130s fly not only from McMurdo to Pole, but also to the larger field camps and to Christchurch. If we wanted to only put JP5 on those flights, we don't have any practical way to do that without switching our infrastructure from AN8 to JP5, and therefore losing that nearly 100,000 gallons of AN8 as mentioned above. So, basically as long as we're sending AN8 to pole, we have to be sending AN8 to other places, and will therefore need to have significantly more AN8 on hand than it would take to send out the required tanker flights to Pole. Sticky situation for sure!

My take on things is basically that, unless the tanker gets in in roughly a week and a half to two weeks, we're going to run out of AN8 before the south pole gets as much fuel as they want. Things will get really interesting if that happens. Now, whether they actually need as much fuel as they want is another question alltogether, and one that I really don't know enough about to make any comments on it. At any rate, the tanker will get here when it gets here, and we'll do our best either way. Will keep this thing posted when I can.

Fuel geek stuff

2006-01-20T22:07:00.000+13:00

Steve writes:
Prist, that's what they add to Fuel to keep it from freezing. :-) Or at least in other really cold places like FT. drum NY, and Alaska. The freezing point of the water suspended in the fuel is lowered to minus 46 degrees F when Prist additive is used. Colder than that I sure they use a variant of it

Can't say for certain that our AN8 contains Prist (that's a brand name being used as a generic term - like kleenex, pop tart, etc) but that's the stuff. We generally just call it "fizzy," a play on the acronym FSII (fuel system icing inhibitor,) which is the more general description. Much more information on FSII can be found here. Although that article mentions FSII being added at fueling, here we get it premixed into the fuel off the tanker so we don't have to deal with the stuff independently from fuel. I'm pretty sure the reason we use FSII isn't so much to keep the water in fuel from icing, but because it sucks any water that may be in solution out and sinks it to the bottom of storage tanks (where it forms a weird pink goo.) At the south pole in winter, the temperature drops below -100 Fahrenheit, so the water is going to freeze pretty much no matter what, but if it's in at the bottom part of a tank that's not a problem. Since all the fuel at south pole gets there in the tanks of LC130s, we have to fuel them only with AN8 to get AN8 at pole.

*****

So, today was a bit crazy in the fuels department here. Due to some weirdness that happened yesterday (long story that would require a lengthly explanation of our town fuel system, but it was a practically unavoidable situation given the late tanker) it took the town crew something like 7 trys to get a transfer out to Willy started. So, rather than getting it rolling at something like 9am, they were just getting it going about 1pm. There were a bunch of ripple effects from the late transfer, but fortunately we were able to juggle people, fuel, and airplanes enough that everyone got fuel when they needed it and nobody stayed at work late. Hopefully, the ANG will stick with their plan tomorrow and things will be all back to normal by Monday. Sunday serves as a kind of reset button at the airfield, can't wait for this one!

2006-01-20T01:07:00.000+13:00

Tanker News:

Sounds like the fuel tanker has started down the shipping channel and is something like 20 miles out of McMurdo. From what I hear, the capitan of the tanker has been flown over the rest of the channel between the ship and McMurdo and only saw a couple places that concerned him. The ice breaker has been running with it's broken screw running about 20% power to allow them to at least move around a bit. Hopefully, that won't further damage the ship and maybe it'll even let the tanker come in sometime in the next couple days. There's a team of divers coming in from Australia, and I believe that the Polar Star is still being prepped to head down here just in case. We'll see how it goes!

Work News:

Pretty chill day out at Willy. The temps are dropping (low 20s Fahrenheit here in McMurdo) and there was a fair amount of wind today which always makes cold feel colder. We fueled a few planes, but nothing worth writing about. Spent a couple hours after my work working with the night skiway cargo people (Team Escargo,) finally got to run one of the big Caterpillar 950s! Got to ride around for a bit in "Redfish" watching and learning what controls do what, which was pretty neat, and got to sit shotgun when we unloaded a skier from pole - a bit special treat! Later, I got to hop in the drivers seat of "Montana" and move some empty pallets around for a few minutes. Sweet machine! Didn't have any problems with controlling it, would feel totally comfortable moving real cargo with one if I had a marshal (spotter,) with a few hours of practice some solo tasks wouldn't be out of the question. If work for me is slow tomorrow, and if the cargo guys aren't too busy I'll most likely try and get some more operating time in, maybe with Molly and Jay Hay's crew (Team America.)

Q/A:

...a question (which may be technical and overly aviation-geeky, but that's me to a T)... do you just have JET-A1 down there or is it some special mix to keep it from being too cold? Do you guys have any 100LL avgas on hand? I saw you mention mogas at one point, but I would guess that would be for the ground vehicles?

I must admit... there are days when fueling airplanes sounds like a ton of fun... even in Antartica. You should see if you can trade fast service to pilots for rides on ferry flights or flight lessons or some such... even the Otters are quite nice planes by general aviation standards... fast and big. -Ben

No Jet-A1 or avgas specifically down here, but we've got some roughly equivalent fuels. There are four different fuels that we deal with:

AN-8: What we use for aviation. Pretty much the same thing as JP-8, but it's a special mixture that has a lower gelling point so that it doesn't turn into a waxy solid when it gets super cold like the south pole can. I believe that we're the only people in the world who use AN8. Don't have the specs on me at the moment, but if I can remember to, I'll grab them and edit this entry to include the gellpoint and all that kind of stuff. I believe that AN-8 also has a little more icing inhibitor (a slightly nasty chemical that basically sticks to water and sinks it to the bottom of the container,) but could be mistaken.

JP-5: Generally speaking, JP5 is another jet-aviation fuel. Here we use it exclusively for heating buildings and running diesel fueled ground equipment. Much more detail can be found here. JP5 and AN8 are very similar fuels, so in a pinch we could fuel airplanes and helicopters with JP5 as long as they won't be at pole in cold (for pole) weather.

Mogas: Just another way of saying "regular unleaded midgrade gasoline." Mogas is rather dangerous stuff, it never ceases to amaze me how casually it's taken, even back in the states. Pretty much the only reason we have mogas here is for running our fleet of light (relatively speaking) trucks and vans. Why we don't have a diesel fueled fleet and forget about mogas (at least in bulk quantity) is beyond me.

Premix: Mogas with some 2-cycle oil added (50:1 ratio,) used to run snowmobiles. The fuels department mixes up pretty much all the premix here, because fuel is our thing!

As far as getting rides on planes goes, that's strictly a no-no. Long story there, but basically the people in charge hold a very tight grip on who gets to get in aircraft as it's looked at as a special privilege. Stupid policy if you ask me, but it is what it is. We do provide fast service all the time though, nine times out of ten (probably more,) we're standing with a nozzle and bonding cable at the wingtip before they've even shut down the props. Pretty much the only time we're not immediately ready for fueling is when we're already dealing with two other planes or when it's an unscheduled flight that showed up when nobody was around. I'd love to get a ride in one of the planes we fuel (especially a Twin Otter,) haven't had a chance to be in any of them with the exception of the C17 I flew down in.

Fueling airplanes at Willy is definitely cool, hope I don't make it sound like it's not. Admittedly, sometimes things at the pits can be really frustrating, but it's usually caused by bad communication, undertrained personnel, or scheduling issues. There's a lot of neat stuff that goes on out at Willy, the weather is generally not too bad, and the scenery is amazing.

Occasionally I have these little moments where I'm simply amazed by this place and what I'm doing in it. Had one today when I was feeling really tired and just leaned up against the side a herc. Was waiting there with a nozzle for the ANG fueling guy to come over and get things rolling. Hard to explain, had a realization that I'm just here doing my job (for the 11th straight day in a row -) leaning against one of something like 10 very unique aircraft that's getting ready to take some much needed fuel to the most southern point in the world, where a friend of mine will be standing by the same fuel port to unload some fuel and help to keep the station there running. Neat stuff!

2006-01-19T00:59:00.000+13:00

The Greenhouse is hereby reopened to recreational use!

Eric Hobday
McMurdo Station Manager
Work 2486
Home 2403
Pager 860

Yay! So, just got back from a 13 hour worday, have to say that email made things seem a lot nicer. Looking at the schedule (as it were) for tomorrow, I'm guessing it's going to be another long one, especially if there are anywhere near as many equipment failures as there were today...

Lookie, we're in the news!

2006-01-18T12:21:00.000+13:00

Check this out, it's an article on the kiwis bringing a P3 spyplane down here to look for illegal fishing in the Antarctic. The picture with the arcticle was taken at the Pegasus runway. Not sure how long those guys will be staying down here, but I suppose there's a chance I'll be able to get out to fuel it or at least take some pictures. In any case, I'll do what I can to get some pictures of the plane and put them up here.

2006-01-18T00:16:00.000+13:00

Fun day today despite working 12 solid hours. Genevieve (sp?,) volunteered to work with Matt and I today, which helped make things a lot more fun. She was really jazzed to be working out at Willy, which I think rubbed off on Matt and I a bit. It was also really nice to have a third set of hands since we ended up fueling a bunch of airplanes. There were at least 6 skiers and 4 twin otters, but might have forgotten one or two. Good conversations, fun projects, no mishaps, good communication, excellent weather.

Here in McMurdo, one of the best ways to get a job in a different department is to go volunteer with them on your (itty bitty little bit) of free time. It's also good because you get a taste of what the other job is like, so you won't spend a lot of time and effort trying to get a job that isn't your thing. One of the nice bits about being in fuels is that a whole lot of other people want to be in fuels as well, so we get a lot of fun volunteers that help make things more interesting.

Hopefully, over the next couple days I'll get some time volunteering with the cargo department. Not so much because I want a job in cargo (I don't,) but because I'll get some time in operating a loader, which seems like it's a good opportunity to learn a useful skill. Plus, I like running big machines in case that hasn't come through here ;)

Sounds like the Polar Star has been deployed from Seattle, and I've heard some rumors that there's a dive team being assembled to come down and try cutting off a blade on the broken propeller to balance it out. Apparently, that's not something that's been done before, but the hope is that by balancing the propeller, they'll be able to spin it along with the other ones and get at least a little thrust out of it. At this point, the damaged prop can't be used at all, so it's stationary and causes a bunch of drag, so the ship is practically disabled. We'll see what happens!

Anyways, it's time for me to grab some food and head towards bed.

2006-01-17T10:58:00.001+13:00

Q:Just it case you're interested, it looks like the Krasin has 3 screws. http://www.fesco.ru/eng/fleet/vessels/ship.html?ship=54 I'd love to know what happened to break one of them! -Ben

A:Thanks for the info, definitely interesting! Went ahead and edited the last entry to make it a bit closer to correct. As far as what happened, my guess was it involved big chunks of ice and Newton's first law. Of course, it could just as easily have been a stealth manatee attack.

On counting chickens....

2006-01-16T23:45:00.000+13:00

So, we've been all set for the fuel tanker to get here since the middle of last week, and guess what was news this morning at the breakfast table? (yeah, I was sleeping, but I heard about it at my breakfast - lunch for everyone else) The Krasin (Russian icebreaker that's been down here cutting the shipping channel) broke a propeller. Neither the tanker nor the cargo vessel can come in to McMurdo without an ice breaker maintaining the channel, and maybe even helping them in. Things are very interesting!

The following two paragraphs are based on rumors. Granted, they're mostly consistent and I've heard this directly from the supervisors of two of the most involved departments down here (fuels and cargo,) but don't take it too seriously.

Apparently, the Krasin has three four bladed propellers, and one of the blades on one prop either got damaged or broken off. Sounds like something that will require a dry dock to get properly fixed, or there are some other ideas that would restore it to a more operational, although not optimum state. It's about a weeks worth of sailing from where it is now to Christchurch, so given an optimistic week for repairs, that's a three week turnaround. There's apparently the possibility of a dive team getting flown in to cut off the opposite blade to get it balanced out. That scenario would leave the prop usable, but it obviously wouldn't provide as much thrust and given the difficulties that they've already been having, might be a bit of a problem. And, it will still take time. The backup icebreaker (either Polar Star or Polar Sea, can't remember which) is currently docked in Seattle, Washington, from whence it would take, on the inside, about three weeks to get down here.

So, either way we're without a functional icebreaker for at least a few weeks. The sea ice that the shipping channel is cut through is under compression (being squeezed from the outside - by thermal issues, tides, glaciers, etc.,) so left to it's own devices it will close off the shopping channel. Usually, the icebreaker is nearly continuously running up and down the channel, shaving ice off the sides to maintain the channel. Without an icebreaker, the channel will just close itself off and there's no way for a normal ship to get in and out. For all practical purposes, the fuel tanker and the cargo vessel are normal ships, so they can't get in and out unless the icebreaker is here and working.

Back to normal - my twisted view of reality:

So, it's sounding like it'll be a while until we have a fuel tanker or a cargo vessel to unload. Given that this is McMurdo, there are all kinds of doomsday scenario rumors flying around, but my bet is that we'll get things straightened out one way or another. Whatever will happen will happen and we'll deal with it, all in a days work.

Not a lot happened at work today. This is my last week on pit shift, looking forward to getting back to regular town duty and working something more like normal hours. This week I'm working with Matt, who's a super cool guy and is a lot of fun to work with. Had a busy, but relatively brief day today, we fueled up four skiers and a twin otter, then managed to get back to McMurdo by about 8:30pm. Not too bad, really nice to have some time to catch up after working long days for the last several!

Hopefully I'll have some more updated, concrete, information tomorrow on what the plan is. In the meantime, here's a map showing where the pertinent ships are right about now:

Gianella - Fuel Tanker
Krasin - Broken Ice Breaker
LMG - Laurence M Gould - research vessel.
NBP - Nathaniel B Palmer - research vessel.
Tern - cargo vessel.

2006-01-16T01:02:00.000+13:00

Totally not on the usual topic, but I just read over my last several posts here and realized that there's not much substance other than work stuff. Boring! Need to get some questions to answer, ideas to work off, things to post pictures of, whatever. The little form on the right side here basically just emails me whatever you punch into the question box; feel free to say hi, toss in a comment, ask a question, or make an observation!

A map of Ross Island and the general area around it:
McMurdo is near the southern tip of Ross Island.

2006-01-15T22:29:00.000+13:00

Saturday was pretty much a normal day at work, had a nice time playing cribbage and visiting with Jay Hay and Tonya. Saved the day by getting the galley truck unstuck after it sunk into snow up to the front axle, other than that not much happened.

Today, on the other hand, was a loooong day. Saturday at the pits I found out that there would be a twin otter coming in today (Sunday) that would need fuel. Usually, we don't fuel planes on Sundays, so I volunteered to go out and deal with it rather than tracking down people after work and talking someone else into going out to Willy on their day off. Figured that it would be a quick trip to Willy that might take an hour and a half total. Stupid stupid Ian. Got word at about 11 this morning that they were going to need fuel a little after noon, so I hopped on the next shuttle out of town. Got the aft fuel pits setup and ready, then fueled the plane right on schedule. Perfect timing, smooth setup, all's well right?

Then, talked to the pilot after fueling, one of the other twin otters would need fuel in two hours. Kind of stinks, but no big deal. Then, he told me that they were going to be back around 6pm needing fuel. There goes the day! Killed a couple hours taking care of some computer stuff over in the vacant (it's Sunday, who would work on Sunday?) cargo shack, fueled the second plane. Today was the annual Kiwi vs US ice rugby match, which happens near the Scott Base transition on the way out to Willy. Nothing but snow between where I was and the rugby match, so I hopped on the snowmobile and zoomed over there to watch the game. Had a good time, took some pictures, got cold. Drove back to Willy when the game was over and read for a bit in one of my travel books on New Zealand, ate some dinner, then hung out playing cards with the DAs (Dining room Assistants) who were running the Willy Galley. Then, right about 6pm when I was wondering where the plane was, I got a call on the radio saying that they wouldn't be in until 8pm. Fortunately, the caller also let me know that there was a party over at Scott Base for the rugby match, so I hopped on a shuttle to go check that out for a little bit. The thing over at Scott Base was neat, wish I hadn't eaten dinner at Willy because there was a bunch of food that looked and smelled really good! Hopped another shuttle back to Willy, fueled the last plane, closed things down, then headed back to McMurdo. That little errand ended up taking 11 hours. Thankfully, I got to have a little fun in the meantime!

2006-01-13T01:49:00.000+13:00

Not such a lazy day today, but if the efficiency dial would have been turned up it sure would have been. Lots of confusion, equipment failures, people not following instructions, bad weather in places planes were going, and just plain stupidity. I don't say this too often, but today stunk. Ended up working very nearly 12 hours, and got back well after all the places to hang out were closed and all my friends (including one I had arrangements to hang out with) were in bed. Much of that time was spent waiting for one thing or another to happen, often that thing really didn't need to happen at all. Not going to go into details, because they're pretty mundane for the most part.

The only thing worth mentioning was one of our small hoses failed, which caused a little fuel spill that we were fortunately able to clean up very quickly with a loader that was already running within a hundred feet of where it happened. Basically what happened is the barb fitting in the end of the hose somehow became loose and the fitting slipped out the end of the hose. Luckily, the fitting was hooked up to a nozzle that was in use, so we knew it right when things broke, and were able to keep it mostly under control.

The other annoying stuff was basically a string of little grinding type things that eventually added up to cause a really frustrating day. Oh well, tomorrow is another day (Friday the 13th no less.) Actually, I guess it's technically Friday already, I'm writing this around 2am, which is getting close to bedtime for me!

2006-01-11T10:49:00.000+13:00

So, it was another lazy day at the fuel pits yesterday. Fueled a few skiers and a twin otter, then headed back to Mactown. No excitement, no problems, no waffles.

We're pretty much ready for the fuel tanker to come in. Officially, it'll be here on Saturday, but of course there are plenty rumors that it's going to be a bit late. There's still a lot of ice (although relatively small bits) floating around in the turning basin and the passage to the ice pier, so there are even rumors that we'll have to do an offload from the turning basin, which would make things quite a bit more 'interesting.'

Basically the setup now is that there's a channel cut through the sea ice from the ice edge (where the ice meets relatively open ocean - a long way away) to this big circular cutout called the turning basin (where ships turn around,) then there's another channel from the basin to the ice pier. Near the end of the ice pier we have some connections to the town pipeline system, so the usual plan is for the tanker to float from wherever it gets gas to the ice edge, then head to the ice pier by way of the channels and the turning basin. Once the tanker pulls up to the ice pier, we connect it to the pipeline using some relatively short sections of 6" layflat hose (same stuff we run out to the airfields,) then start pumping. The tanker has it's own enormous pumps onboard, but since it's a long way (and up) to the bulk tanks, we have four 6 cylinder diesel booster pumps positioned along the pipeline about halfway up to help shove the fuel up to the tanks. So, once we get things started it should take the better part of two (24 hour) days of nonstop pumping to move something on the order of 6 million gallons of jet fuel at about 3,000 gallons per minute. That's a bunch of fuel! We'll also be getting some mogas (what we call regular unleaded gasoline down here - it's an old military thing,) but since it's such dangerous stuff to work with and our mogas tank is much lower in elevation, we can just hook it up to the tanker and let them do all the pumping without using booster pumps. About half the fuelies will be transitioning to working nights tomorrow so that once the tanker gets in we'll be able to get it unloaded as quickly as possible. I'll still officially be on pit shift, but it'll get extended to being a noon-midnight type thing so that I can help the people doing tanker offload during mealtimes and cover the usual day-to-day operations that need to happen. Should be fun!

So, that's the plan. It'll be interesting to see what actually happens!

2006-01-09T22:19:00.000+13:00

Not a whole lot of interesting new stuff today. Tonya has rotated into Jody's position at fuel pits (we work pit shifts on overlapping 2-3 week rotations,) so we basically sat around talking about bike touring, traveling in New Zealand, Sudoku, and random stuff in between fueling three skiers and zipping over to the transition and back to swap snowmobiles. Ours started blowing oil the other day (shot head gasket,) so we've been using an old loaner called "Frankenvinny." Scary name, which is appropriate as it's one of the old Alpine 1s that only have one ski is therefore a bit unstable, likes to follow grooves in the snow (plentiful at the airfield,) and has a turning radius comparable to the Queen Mary. Also visited a bit with Jay Hay, one of my cargo friends, and think I'm getting things lined up to get some training time in a widetire 950! (Mid-size Caterpillar loader with forks and big snow tires - cool machine)

Had dinner (lunch for me) at the strip, which was nice because the night firefighters out there had recently made waffles! At the Willy field galley, there's a waffle iron and a bucket of batter in the fridge, which I personally think is absolutely brilliant. Only problem is that usually the iron is cold and I generally don't have time/patience to let it warm and cook a waffle during my food break. Tonight I was lucky though, so it was a big Belgian waffle smothered in butter and honey for me!

So, lunch kind of made the day. Then, we got to leave a bit early since there were no more planes to fuel! The coffee house was closed, as was the galley (for a DV reception...argh!) so I was pretty lucky to discover that someone had grabbed the chess boards out of the galley beforehand and put them in the lounge upstairs in 155 (the building that the galley, computer kiosk, store, barbershop, and some dorms are.) Won a game of chess, a first for me on this continent, so that was cool. After the chess was over, I headed downstairs to see if the reception was done so I could eat my evening meal, but alas it wasn't. Sat down at the computer to write this, and by the sound of things that too just long enough for the galley to reopen!

Life is food.

2006-01-08T09:43:00.000+13:00

Started out work Friday with a long (20 miles roundtrip) snowmobile drive to run some sample bottles from Willy Field out to Pegasus for potentially fueling a C17 full of DVs. DV is short for "Distinguished Visitor" - in this case it was a few senators and a bunch of representatives. Turned out that it didn't need any fuel, but no biggie, it was a nice drive. Had a little bit of confusion and chaos a couple hours later when the ANG thought they were going to bring a plane over to fuel it at something like 1am for a 2am takeoff. Let them know we were leaving at 10pm, so they'd either have to reschedule things or get fuel somewhere else (maybe not in that exact wording, but not too far off - those guys should know by now that we're not a 24 hour operation.) They ended up doing some rescheduling and Jodie and I suddenly had three LC-130s in the pits at the same time. Think that might be some kind of record. We ended up fueling 5 skiers and a twin otter that evening (that's a bunch,) and still got off work a little early since there was supposedly nothing else out there that was going to need fueling. Unfortunately, there was apparently a bit more confusion very early Saturday morning and Trevor (who had the [new] duty pager) had to go out there and add an additional 1,200 or so gallons to one of the planes because it's mission had changed a little bit. Learning that these DV visits(the root of all the craziness) are fun stuff!

Three LC-130s in the fuel pits

Saturday was not without it's own issues, but on a much smaller scale. There weren't any planes to fuel, so Jody and I basically went out to the pits, helped out with finishing up a fuel transfer to fill the aviation tanks, double checked that there was nothing that would need fuel, then left.

About halfway to the Scott Base transition, we saw a twin otter coming in for a landing, looked at our schedules to confirm that it wasn't landing, watched it land, crossed our fingers that it wouldn't need fuel. Then Gina hopped on the radio to say that the twin otter guys had called the office and would be needing to refuel a plane... So, I hopped back on the radio to ask our shuttle driver to stop (we were in a delta, so the cab and passenger compartments are separated by several feet and a big noisy diesel engine.) Got out of the delta and started walking back to Willy, hitched a ride on a different delta and got dropped off a the fuel pits. Turned out that there had been a bit of a miscommunication between the Italian program whose plane it was and the ground support people, and they were very apologetic for calling us in to fuel a plane after saying that there was nothing left to do. No big deal though since it was still well before our shifts were over, so I wasn't working late or anything - just another day at Willy!

The MAAG (pronounced "mog", McMurdo Alternative Art Gallery) happened Saturday evening. Some neat stuff, but unfortunately I didn't think to take my camera and therefore have no pictures until I can get copies of some from other people. After checking out MAAG, I visited with friends until late and then went to bed!

***Questions***
Q:hello Ian from Brandon, a sixth grade student who is interested in
monkeys. becuz they are awesome. -Brandon

A:Hey Brandon! Yeah, monkeys are pretty cool. Don't have many of them down here, unless you want to count people as being less furry monkeys that don't usually fling poo.

Q:What is the coldest temperature that you have experienced? -Kelvin

A:Not sure exactly, but I think it was down around -20F when I first got down here, honestly don't remember the numbers. Think with windchill figured in, I've been out in -60 to -80 or something along those lines. At any rate, pretty cold. Had my beard freeze to the inside of my facemask a few times. Sunglasses would nearly instantly frost over when stepping outside on cooler days in October. Will try to get some more concrete numbers later!

Q:at school here looking through your postings. a student noticed that
you say "stuff" a lot and wonders why. how are you!!! -Mom

A:Doing pretty well I suppose, just life as usual. Work, sleep, repeat... Counted the word "stuff" 10 times on the current page of entries (mostly in that last post,) which is probably a little excessive. Guess it's just a handy word to use.

2006-01-06T11:49:00.000+13:00

Got up extra early today to go attend a redeployment meeting that covered a bunch of different stuff on what happens when we get done working down here. Went over getting our stuff back to civilization, cleaning up our rooms in preparation for their next occupants, financial and health stuff, and the fun part - travel! Still not sure exactly what my plans will be for after the ice, but it's fairly certain that there will be at least a little traveling around New Zealand involved! If things work out for it, I might try swinging by some other places on the way back home, but the main plan is to spend a month or two in NZ. Not that I'm having a bad time down here or anything, but I'm ready to get off the ice and back to someplace where the sun sets and things outside are alive!

Speaking of travel, I just got an email from my friend Thor (one of the guys from Mountain Crossings / Neels Gap,) who's in South Korea teaching English. Sounds like a really neat arrangement he's got, neat job in an even neater place! Here's a funny little snipped from that email:
The next night they added seafood and rice which was really
good too, though their idea of seafood differs from in the States. I
have learned not to expect shrimp, scallops, and crab. Here it is
octopus, squid, urchin and eel, different but good. If you are lucky
it will be cooked, as it is normal for it to be raw. Fine by me, but
after that third helping of raw squid you wonder if you can feel
things moving around down there. And on occasion, it is moving around,
so remind yourself to chew thoroughly to avoid any attempts at escape.

Also, I grabbed this picture off the common drive of the Krasin cutting ice recently. Not sure who took it, but thought it was neat and figured I'd put it here.

2006-01-05T23:42:00.000+13:00

So, today was a rather long day in which I did almost nothing. Had a bit of fresh snowfall that had a bunch of flights on weather delay so Jody and I basically sat around all day in the warmup shack doing Sudoku puzzles, eating, and making dirty jokes. All day we kept hearing that there were planes that would be leaving soon and might need fuel, but they kept getting pushed farther and farther back, or on occasion would take off without needing any more fuel. I did run some relatively quick errands around Willy with Delta Scharen - basically filled her tank up, then topped off the generator building and the day tank (what people at Willy use to fuel their vehicles.) Finally, at about 10:30 we heard that neither Kenn Borek (the Twin Otter subcontractor) or the Air National Guard (the skier guys) were going to need fuel, so we could leave! Had a long delta ride back to town and arrived just after the coffee house closed. Oh well.

Have to get up early tomorrow for a redeployment meeting. The end is in sight!

Skier with ice

yawn

2006-01-04T11:05:00.000+13:00

So, still not sure what to think about this new schedule. I'm adjusted to getting up around 10am and going to bed around 2am, but it's kind of weird not seeing anyone since when I'm around town they're working, and by the time I get back everyone is asleep. That said, it is nice to get up and go read for a bit in the galley over a bit of cereal, and the relatively laid back work assignment isn't bad either.

Getting started with teaching myself some basic calculus, but haven't gotten enough into it to say much about that. Just got my textbook down here about a week ago, but had been too busy with other things to get started on it. Been reading a Douglas Adams book called Last Chance to See over the last few days. Neat little book, it's basically a travel book about searching for endangered species, but written with Adams' characteristic humor. I like it because it's got the same sort of crazy stuff that's in books like the hitchiker's guide, but it actually happened in the real world. Fun stuff.

Anyways, I'm off to the galley to get a couple sandwiches to take out to the pits, and some cookies too since it's cookie day! Later.

Another day at the pits

2006-01-04T00:34:00.000+13:00

For the most part, things went pretty smoothly today. Think we did 3 skiers and 2 twin otters in the evening. Only hitch was some kind of internal glitch in Skier 96 that forced us to stop halfway through, then restart again something like 45 minutes later. Not sure whether that one was operator error or some kind of mechanical thing, but it really doesn't make any difference to me I suppose.

Since we were getting pretty low on aviation fuel at the pits, Jody and I used the pumps to consolidate what was left out of several of the nearly empty tanks into a couple specific tanks (tanks 1 and 11, which are the two ends of the line) once we were done with fueling planes. Consolidating fuel will make things easier for the morning pits crew tomorrow when we do a transfer from town to fill up the aviation tanks at Willy. Kind of complex reasoning behind that, so I'll spare you the long explanation of how our fuel pits are plumbed, static charges in fuel, and the uncanny ability for airplanes to show up at really bad moments during a transfer.

Some numbers just for fun (all from memory, so don't take them too seriously:)

*Total capacity of one of our aviation tanks at Willy: 20,000 gallons
*Usable capacity: 17,800 gallons (we don't usually drain them to the very bottom)
*Number of aviation tanks at Willy: 11
*Number of aviation tanks at Ice Runway (when it's setup): 6
*Number of aviation tanks at Pegasus: 2
*Weight of a gallon of jet fuel: about 7.1 pounds
*Average amount given to LC-130 during fueling: Something like 6,000 gallons
*Average amount given to Twin Otter during fueling: Something like 300 gallons
*Time to fuel a skier: Roughly half an hour start to finish, but highly variable
*LC-130s fueled at Willy each day: 7-8 usually; ~4 in the morning, ~3 in the evening
*Fuel pumps at Willy: 4, two primary and two backup. All are 4 cylinder diesel powered pumps.
*Number of periodicals in the fuels warmup shack: one metric stack
*Number of interesting periodicals in the fuels warmup shack: 0
*New ANG guy handing you a credit card at the start of fueling: priceless.

Made it back to McMurdo sometime around 10pm and headed up to the fuels barn. Then after filling out paperwork back at the barn I went over to the coffee house, visited with some friends at "Southern Exposure," started some laundry, worked on school stuff, ate midrats, wrote this thing. About to finish with this post, pick up laundry, and finally go to bed!

2006-01-02T21:44:00.000+13:00

Just got done with my first workday on PM pits, had a pretty good time! Our first LC-130s had a small internal fuel leak right off the bat when Jody was showing me the ropes. She was taking care of that right about that time we had another skier (short for LC-130) come on deck for fueling. So I basically fell headfirst into fueling planes by myself for the first time (had done each individual part before, just hadn't done everything solo,) which wasn't all that bad.

It was eventually determined that the leak today was caused by a bit of operator error. Sounds like someone (on the plane crew) left a vent valve in the plane open or something along those lines. No big deal this time since there was only a little bit of fuel that came out so Jody could just shovel the little bit of contaminated snow into a bucket. It's pretty nice that snow acts like a sponge for aviation fuel so that we can easily clean up little spills like that one.

Last Friday however, there was a rather significant fuel spill out of an LC-130. Sounds like this one was operator error as well (again on the plane crew's part,) but on a slightly different magnitude. As a plane was getting fueled last Friday, there was suddenly a shimmering waterfall (slight exaggeration maybe) of AN-8 showering down out of one of the wings of Skier 96 (we refer to the skiers by the last two digits of their tail number.) So, the pit crew (Jody and Matt) immediately shut off the fuel and grabbed an open-top drum. The drum was placed under the stream, where it quickly started filling up. Very fortunately, Scharen (the awesome fuels truck) had been parked at the fuel pits, so they were able to drive it over to the drum and start sucking fuel out of the drum as it was being filled by the fuel spilling from the plane. Had Scharen not been there (or had Jody and Matt not saved the day [again],) several hundred more gallons of fuel would have hit the ground than the estimated 200 that did. The spill response crew ended up digging up an awful lot of contaminated snow on that one!

Of course, these kind of things aren't commonplace down here, just seems like we've had a bit of bad luck over the last few days. Think a lot of it is due to the fact that we've got a couple new air crews in town, so they're still learning how things work (or don't) down here. On my second skier for instance, the ANG (Air National Guard - the people who fly the planes and hook the nozzle to the plane, we do everything upstream from that) fuel guy told me to start pumping at low speed, which I did. He then kept motioning for me to start the pumps for some reason, even though I double checked everything and gave him a thumbs up. So, after he motioned again for me to start, I checked the fuel meter which was sitting still on 2 gallons. Eventually we established that I was in fact pumping and that he hadn't actually hooked the nozzle all the way into the plane and flipped the 'on' latch. Granted, we do have a bit of a different fuel system than these guys are used to, so he might have been a bit frazzled from that (and last weekend,) but I'm pretty sure military single point aviation nozzles are standardized....

Anyways, ended up fueling two skiers and two twin otters in rapid succession by myself, and Jody's skier eventually took off.

It is what it is.

Monday Monday

2006-01-02T09:46:00.000+13:00

Wow, what a weekend! After that last post, I went back home to find a bunch of people getting started with their New Years celebrating on our tiny balcony at MMI. Hung out there for a bit, then helped out with setting up our 'under the radar' new years thing (basically just helped with lugging stuff up to the location.) Had a blast bringing in 2006, until something like 3am when I was completely exhausted and had to go to bed. Most fun New Years party I've ever been to, and the general consensus is it was the best party on the ice this season!

Sunday was IceStock 2006, a big open air concert that happens annually at McMurdo. We have several good bands this year that were all interested in performing, so it was a pretty long event. Also had a chili cookoff mixed in, which turned out to be pretty neat even though my tummy didn't feel too good after all that chili and junk food. Ate dinner after IceStock, helped out with cleaning up the newyears party site, watched a movie in the lounge at MMI, then headed off for bed.

Today is my first day on "PM Pits," which basically means I show up at work at noon, ride a Delta out to Willy Field, then stay there until around 10pm fueling planes as needed. Relative to "Town Crew," what I've been doing most of the season, it's generally a pretty relaxed task, so I'm looking forward to recovering from working really hard for the last couple months. I'll be on PM Pits for three weeks, which means that I'll be working Pits when tanker offload takes place. Things will be much more busy when offload is going on, so I'll likely be working 12 hour shifts between 11am and 11pm, but it should be an interesting event so I'm looking forward to that.

It is a long weekend!

2005-12-31T19:30:00.000+13:00

Yay! Slept in until about noon on Friday, ate lunch, called people back in the states, had dinner, then went out and partied with the rest of the station until late. It was a Friday before a two day weekend for most people, and Molly's birthday to boot! Was really nice to chat with some family type people for the first time in a while, should try and make time to do that more often. Had a good time out as well; played a lot of airhockey, had some fun conversations, and listened to some good live music at the coffee house. Nice day!

Today, I slept in again (but not as late,) had brunch with some friends, then ended up going on a hike with them out to Castle Rock. Had a good time, we did an out-and-back from McMurdo out to the top of Castle Rock and back. Neat views, nearly perfect weather, good times! Kish brought a little backpacking guitar with him, and since Sky was also along, we had 2/3s of one of McMurdo's best bands (Ja Chant) with us on top of the rock! Sky and Kish threw a little impromptu concert that was really neat, then it got a little breezy and therefore cold, so we headed back to McMurdo and dinner! At the coffee house right now getting a little caffeine in my system, then will be off to celebrate new years shortly!

Castle Rock is on the right, Erebus in the background. You can see silhouettes of a couple people on top of Castle rock for perspective	Dave and Sky climbing up Castle Rock. Nice little scramble to the top!

***Questions***
Q:What kind of wildlife do you have down there?
-Joyce E (through mom)

A:Not much animal life at all other than people down here. Just a lot of volcanic rock and ice. The most common animal here is the skua (not positive, but I believe we have South Polar Skuas specifically.) Skuas are a lot like big, bold, aggressive seagulls. Most people down here don't like skuas very much, but I personally think they're pretty impressive animals. That said, I haven't been divebombed by one yet. They like to steal people's food by flying right at a persons head, which usually scares the person into dropping their food onto the ground, where the skua will then grab it and fly away. Other times, they just cut to the chase and swoop right down onto what you're carrying to grab it and take it away. I've had a skua steal a frisbee and fly with it for a little bit until it realized that the frisbee wasn't food.

We also have Weddell Seals and Leopard Seals, which I suppose are interesting animals, but really from what I can tell they're just big furry balls of fat that occasionally pop out of cracks in the ice to lay nearly motionless on the ice.

There are occasionally penguins around, but they're not too common. We've got two varieties in this neck of the woods; the more common Adelie, and the relatively rare Emperor Penguin. I've never seen an Adelie, but was lucky enough to see an Emperor up close and personal on my first week down here. There are plenty people who have been down here for several seasons and never seen an Emperor penguin, so I was really lucky to run across that one on sea ice training last October.

Finally, there's stuff that lives only in the water. We've got some fish, a lot of single cell thingies, killer whales, and other swimmy animals. I've not seen any of these so far, and really don't know exactly what's there so I can't comment much on them. For pretty much the entire time I've been here in McMurdo, the water has had a thick crust of ice on top, but with the warmer weather and the icebreaker in town, there will soon be a lot more water visible, so I'm hoping to see some new wildlife!

There's a boat...on the runway!?

2005-12-29T18:16:00.000+13:00

So, two days ago there was a little dot and occasional smoke visible on the horizon. Yesterday, the trail out to hut point was practically a pilgrimage route. Today, there's an icebreaker cutting up the old ice runway. Yay!

Think I might have gotten things setup for a three day weekend, which is a precious rarity down here - we usually only get three two day weekends per season. Basically chalked up a bunch of overtime over the last couple weeks, so given that tomorrow will probably be a slow day I'm taking it off as a comp day. On top of that, it's new years weekend, so Saturday is the beginning of the third two day weekend for us fuelies. Only question is whether I'll spend (part of) Saturday running Scharen or maybe the fuel pits as there will be generators running and planes flying, they have to get fuel from somewhere! Not sure what I'll do with all that free time, but will surely come up with something!

More writing and pictures are on the way, but the galley will be closing in 20 minutes and I haven't grabbed any dinner yet.

Wading in the Ross Sea

2005-12-27T19:22:00.000+13:00

Pretty neat work day today! Started out at 7:30 again, which was nice since it seemed like sleeping in after doing the heliport for the last week or so. Spent the first part of the morning filling up a pallet full of premix (regular gas with 2-cycle oil added) drums that'll get shipped off to the south pole. Nothing too exciting there, but it's not bad work.

After lunch however, we had a bit more interesting task. The hose that runs out to Willy field starts off on solid ground on a hill, then runs down to the transition zone between the ground and the ice. A lot of the ice at the transition has started melting and being generally turned to slush by moving tides, dirt, pressure from the ice. The problem here is that if we just leave things as they are, the hose would end up in the water and would later freeze into place when things cool off again over the next month or two. A hose frozen in ice is a very nasty problem to deal with, so it's something that we generally try to avoid. So, to prevent the hose from dipping too far into the water, we went over there with waders, some string, and an innertube to fix the problem. The water wasn't quite as cold as I would have guessed, but it's definitely not warm! The bottom was a bit slick too (it is ice afterall,) so you have to be really careful about slipping around or going in too deep. Managed to get the innertube squeezed under the hose and tied into place without incident, and had a good time getting it done!

Back to work

2005-12-26T21:50:00.000+13:00

After that last post on Saturday, I ended up getting a little motivated to go up to the fuels barn and make a picture frame. It was definitely refreshing to just plug in some of my music, chat with Doc a bit, then grab an old weathered piece of dunnage and turn it into something new. By the time I had built a ripping fence for our circular saw, a jig to clamp the frame in place (since we have like 3 real clamps and they're huge,) and the parts of the frame itself, it was getting kind of late and I got a bit sloppy. So, in the end I'm not super happy with what I ended up with, but as we say it's a harsh continent.

Christmas day was a real bummer - with the exception of the excellent dinner. A synergy of lots of work, not so much sleep, feeling a little sick, missing friends/family/darkness, a friend from KY passing away, and some other junk that doesn't belong here was to blame. But, there's nothing I can do about any of that stuff, so there's no point in writing more about it. Dinner was excellent, we had green stuff that didn't come from a can... And real ice cream!

Monday so far has been a bit better than Sunday was. Started working about 5:45am when I met up with David at the heliport so I could show him how to open it up. Glad to be handing that task over to someone else, I really don't like getting up that early and tend to get sucked into working as late as everyone else instead of getting off an hour earlier. Opening up went pretty smoothly with the exception of one handfull of ice cold fuel without a glove on (first time for everything I guess,) but it was merely ice cold and therefore my hand is intact.

Had a relatively leisurely breakfast after opening the heliport, and noticed that my name was on the mail list! Got to work and sat through an hour long safety meeting on MSDS sheets and how they could prevent accidents, or at least minimize their impact. Wouldn't have been that bad if the guy was halfway competent and could say "I don't know" instead of stumbling his way around making up a definition for vapor pressure that was rather incorrect. Reminded me a lot of high school, fortunately I managed not to call his bluff on that one. Just couldn't resist one question that succinctly turned the safety guy's main anecdote (about how MSDS sheets could save the day) on it's head shortly after that, but fortunately our instructor was among those in the room who didn't seem to catch it. Guess I'd take this safety guy a little more seriously if he wasn't into skydiving.

After the safety meeting, I was assigned the task of working on pumping snowmelt out of the containments at our bulk tank farm along with David. Had a good time with that one, and managed to get a few other little work tasks done while waiting for the pump to do it's thing. Also had a little time to think about Life, the universe, and everything, and realized that there's more than just the (bonus) money that's keeping me from leaving McMurdo early. I really do like working here. Guess it's easy to overdo things and get burned out. The things that have been bugging me really aren't things that would go away for long if I were to leave (except for the constant sunlight,) which was a pretty refreshing thought despite how dark it sounds. Got to feeling a lot better by the time my lunch break rolled around. Then, I had a chance to swing by the mail room to pick up that package with some neat Christmas treats!

After lunch, a few of us went out to the Willy hose to cut out a section that had 'blistered' and replace it with a short jumper of new hose. The hose we use is constructed with a few different layers, so if there's ever a fault in one of the inner ones, it tends to not make it through the outer ones without first stretching them and making a bulge that looks like a blister. Fortunately, that doesn't happen too often. In fact, it happens infrequently enough that nobody who was available to fix it had ever done this before. We did manage to get through the process without incident though, and had a good time doing it. Of course, we didn't quite manage to pull it off flawlessly - we forgot to bring a crucial part and had to run back to McMurdo to grab it. It's nice to have problems like blisters in hose that you can find, then go out and do something about.

Christmas eve update

2005-12-24T14:35:00.000+13:00

It's been a bit of a busy few days leading up to this weekend, but I've finally got all my work stuff done until early Monday morning!

Thursday the first C-17 in a month or two came in, Jody and I ended up driving out to Pegasus to refuel it. Unfortunately, nobody told either of us that the road from McMurdo out to Pegasus had been closed to regular vehicle traffic... Boy am I glad that truck has four wheel drive and big snow tires! Most of the way out, I had the speedo at about 35-40 miles per hour, but was probably moving more in the neighborhood of 20, and was continually on the edge of getting stuck even at that. Basically it was one 10 mile long snowbogging adventure, and fortunatley one without getting stuck either way. On the way back as we were approaching a delta from the rear, the delta driver gave us a call on the radio that went something like "Fuelies on the Pegasus road - Looks like you've got your thing going, let me know what to do so I don't get in the way and slow you guys down!" We responded on the radio above the sound of a revving engine to have the delta pull off to the side. Managed to pass him without having to slow down or go off the road, which surely would have gotten us stuck instantly. Apparently that one prompted a bit of laughter back at fuels control. Good times.

Friday we finished with reeling up the ice runway hose and had fleet ops pull out a culvert pipe we had used for making a bridge over it, so now there's nothing left of the ice runway except for a bit of dirty ice from the LC-130s exhaust and dirt that was tracked out from town. Even all of that dirty snow is now covered up with snow, so you can't even see anything out there. Hopefully there will soon be water where the runway was, can't wait to see that.

Our fuelie Christmas party got started around 3pm Friday evening after we got off work early for the holidays. Had a good time at that, played some fun games, ate some good food, and of course plenty fun conversation. At one point the toaster oven we were using to cook little pizza things with got a bit smokey, so I grabbed my gloves, and started carrying it to the door so the smoke alarm (and automatic fire suppression system) wouldn't go off. On the way out, Scott had a brilliant idea and we ended up cooking on Doc's work table underneath an exhaust hood. Nothing like industrial cooking! The heavy shop was putting on their giant Christmas party Friday evening as well, so after a few hours at the fuels barn, we migrated over to Seth and Bodie's room for a bit, then over to the heavy shop. That get together was a lot bigger and louder (typical of the heavy shop I guess,) but still fun nevertheless.

This morning I had to get up and take Scharen out to fuel the generators at Pegasus and Willy Fields, as well as add a new valve onto our fueling system at Pegasus. Things went pretty smoothly, but due to our warm weather lately the roads were a bit squishy so I had to go pretty slow. Not sure what this evening will bring, but I'm at the coffee shop right now and might just spend the rest of the evening over here.

2005-12-21T20:56:00.000+13:00

Today after I opened up the heliport, we got started with the rolling up of the Ice Runway hose. The warm weather has made things get a bit slushy out on the sea ice, occasionally your footstep will punch a hole through a crusty layer and you'll go in to your ankles in briny slush. Fun stuff! Discovered that our trailer is actually parked right across a crack in the ice, which really isn't as weird as it sounds, but it's something I find interesting. Cracks, as we call them, aren't usually gaping holes from the surface to the water below. They are typically formed pretty slowly and are essentially trenches in the surface of the ice with a frozen solid bottom. They're not dangerous as long as the ice on either side is thick enough to support whatever you're doing (it is) or they're not too wide (it's not - on the order of 5" maybe.) Should have some of the kind of cracks with open water in them soon - the Russian icebreaker might be in as soon as the end of this week or the beginning of the next one!

Work wise, things didn't go as smoothly as we had hoped, but they weren't really that bad either. It turned out that one of the reels was damaged apparently in the drive down to the ice, so we weren't able to use it and will have to do a little logistical juggling to get it switched out. The main problem is that the loaders that are in town right now don't have the super wide tires for driving on the ice, so we'll have to get the whole trailer pulled back to solid ground to do the swap. The sled thing that David and I built worked exactly as designed, so that was cool. I've never tried reeling in hose the old way (tying buckets and hose to a sled as best as possible,) but the people who saw the sled and have done it the old way said that it's a huge improvement. Volunteered to work part of Saturday (which I would otherwise have off work for Christmas) and drive Scharen out to the runways to keep their generator buildings fueled. Hopefully I'll not have to open the heliport so I can sleep in a bit and head out for a nice drive.

Somehow managed to drop the duty pager somewhere out on the ice, which is apparently a very bad thing as it sounds like there aren't any spare pagers on station. Will have to wait until tomorrow to see what the ramifications of that one are. Might end up spending all day tomorrow roaming around with a metal detector while someone else is sitting at a phone paging over and over ;) Wish someone would have told me beforehand how rare those things are down here, I hadn't really thought about it and assumed that it was just another old $15 thing that we had a bazillion of (judging by some of the people who carry them and probably don't need to.)

Heard through the grapevine that the second LDB payload is pretty much trashed, so a lot of scientists who were involved in that project will be heading home soon. Big bummer for them.

Spent my evening after work chilling out and doing number puzzles (highly unusual behavior, but it was captivating for some reason, thanks mom!) then watching a NOVA documentary on a first ascent of Vinson Massif. Neat stuff, too bad it's so far away from here. Really looking forward to getting to New Zealand when my contract here is up to go backpacking and maybe climb some mountains too. I'd really like to see some stars as well, next sunset here isn't until 1:38am. February 20th 2006.

oink!

2005-12-20T12:53:00.000+13:00

Yesterday was a looong day. After not quite enough sleep, I woke up at 5:15, was getting the heliport opened by 6, ate breakfast, then got back to work. Spent the first half of the day driving Delta Scharen fueling buildings at Willy Field by myself, which was pretty nice. Then after lunch I did some woodworking, then helped load four of our big reels and bases onto a Challenger trailer and chained them down. Got off work at 5:45 or so, ate a quick dinner, then went over to the firehouse for a 3 hour CPR course. The course went pretty well, but drug out for about an hour longer than I would have liked. But, 3 hours and $3 for a bunch of information and a CPR certification isn't bad I guess. At about 10pm, I got done with the CPR thing and went over to the coffee house for a party until around midnight.

This morning things went well and we successfully completed the pigging operation. Ended up having to strap the line out to ice runway because it had drifted in over the weekend, but that went super smoothly. I ended up driving the Pisten Bully doing the strapping, but unfortunately it was our bully that has a passenger compartment on the back instead of the cool loaner one we had with a flat bed and an articulated boom... Things went well either way and we got done with the strapping at about the same time that the pigging crew was ready to do their thing - good timing! Wasn't directly involved in the pigging operation unfortunately, ended up getting things together for rolling up the hose and taking care of some smallish tasks around town. After lunch we started staging stuff for rolling up the hose tomorrow, basically gathering together a bunch of tools and parts, loading them into various vehicles. We somehow managed to forget about loading these electric motor/gearbox units onto the reel bases before we drug the bases out onto the ice. That turned out to be a little bit of a pain since we had to load the power units one at a time onto banana sleds and drag them out to the trailer by hand and then load them - also by hand. Heavy, awkward work.

Did get to see a Weddell Seal at fairly close range, which was interesting. The seals barely move when they're on land, so they're kind of boring to watch - just big lumps of fat with a fur coating basically. The second LDB launch happened yesterday evening, which I also missed. Did get to see the balloon from town as it drifted skyward, kind of neat. The balloon launch had a bit of a problem though, so the team was forced to send the 'self destruct' command to the balloon and drop the payload from about 80,000 feet up and 80 miles from town, with a parachute, but nobody seems to know whether the payload will be relaunchable yet. Big bummer for the science team that was behind the launch obviously. There's a neat page about CREAM over here including a link to a live map of where the balloon is. No plans for tonight other than to get more sleep than I have in the last few days...

The beat goes on

2005-12-18T21:33:00.000+13:00

First off, I'll admit that I've been a bit bummed out lately. There haven't been as many flights coming in from Christchurch, and those that are coming in are carrying more critical stuff than fresh food, which leads to not as nice food (not saying it's always bad, but there are definitely meals when nothing looks too appetizing.) I'm burned out on powdered eggs to the point that I can hardly force myself to eat french toast, which had been a bit of a breakfast standby. Not good - breakfast is my favorite and usually biggest meal of the day. Often feeling really bored when I'm not working (even sometimes at work on slower days,) don't like being inside but fuelies spend so much time working outside that hiking or whatever isn't very appealing either. There's nothing alive around here other than people, skuas (see picture,) and this giant ball of fat down near the ice pier that people call a Weddell Seal. Not even any smells other than diesel engines (diesel fuel too, except that I don't notice that smell anymore) and the occasional whiff of the wastewater plant. There's just nothing here except for rock, ice, intense sun, and whatever it is that transforms this place from a barren wasteland to an industrial frontier town. The irony is that when I was back in Colorado, I went on mountaineering trips to see places that were nearly as barren for entertainment, but here it's a treat to have some paper flowers made of pipe cleaners and tissue paper. Also, our tiny hydroponic greenhouse, which I unfortunately didn't get a chance to get any pictures of, has been closed to public access due to 'safety' concerns. This corporate push for 'safety' (using quotes because it's more about the perception of safety than any real improvements) has really gotten on my nerves along with everyone else's. I missed the LDB launch, but thankfully can post a picture that someone else took and posted on the community drive...

A Skua waiting for some food to steal:	The LDB launch I missed (the red and white rectangles are helium trailers - same size as your usual semi truck trailer - being pulled by stretch D8s:

All that said, life is pretty good really - just need to blow off a little steam and make sure I don't make it sound like life in McMurdo is perfect.

While this place is stark, it's definitely beautiful. The ice and atmosphere here make the views incredibly dynamic - looking off in the same direction seldom looks the same. We have a front row seat to a unique, huge, active volcano. In the other direction is a large frozen sound that will soon be breaking up and (hopefully) turning into open water complete with whales, penguins, and an oil tanker. On the far side of the sound is the Royal Society Range - 13,000 feet tall with several glaciers running down it all the way into the sea. Around town there are incredible science projects going on, and all the interesting folks it takes to make them work. In case you haven't noticed here, I'm a bit of a gearhead, so all the unique machines and tools that we get to work with are a real treat too.

Contrary to what the first paragraph might have you believe, the last few days down here have been pretty nice really. Saturday after working (see the post on strapping,) I visited with some friends for a bit, then watched the "Annual McMurdo Women's Soiree," which is a neat performance that a bunch of the women on station get together every year - as the name implies. It was a neat show, especially cool since several of the performers are people I work with everyday. There were skits, movies, dancing, live music, and art all rolled into one big show. Sunday (today) has been a bit more laid back, but still nice. Got to sleep in and go to brunch as usual on Sundays, did all my laundry, then spent much of the rest of the day playing ping pong with a bunch of friends. We had intended to go out and take advantage of the frisbee golf course, but the wind was a bit stiff and cold so that plan dissolved pretty quickly. Ezra, one of the galley crew, found out that the recreation department has a few more goals that haven't been put in yet. We're planning on playing the current course then figuring out locations to install the new goals, but I guess that'll have to wait for another day.

The Soiree:

This next week should be interesting in a bunch of different ways. For the first time since I've been working here, I've got a little bit of a different job than the usual "fuels town crew." I'll be waking up around 5am (instead of the usual 6:15am, but I do get to leave work at 4:30 - an hour earlier than usual) to go get the heliport fueling system ready for the day's business. Basically that entails measuring how much fuel is in the heliport tanks, setting the valves to fuel choppers from the appropriate tank, taking fuel samples, logging fuel quantities used, checking the fuel filters, and making sure all the equipment is in good shape. Heliport duty goes hand in hand with the duty pager, so if anything fuel related goes awry after our operating hours, I'm the guy that gets paged to deal with it. Fortunately (since I'm not a morning person,) this will only last for a week.

Also, we'll be pigging the Ice Runway fuel line on Tuesday, then rolling it up as soon after that as possible. Pigging line is an interesting, exciting, and rather dangerous procedure for flushing fuel from flexible fuel hose. We have about a mile of flexible hose running from town out to where the ice runway was, which is full of about 8,000 gallons of jet fuel (basically the same thing as kerosene or diesel fuel.) Before we can roll that hose up for storage until next season, we have to get just about every drop of that fuel out, but it's more complex than just hooking up a big shop vac to one end and sucking it all out. In simple terms, what we do is put a dense foam rubber bullet (the pig) in one end of the hose, then hook up a massive air compressor to the hose behind that. The other end of the hose is piped into one of our bulk fuel tanks. We turn on the compressor and push a bunch of air in - at over 150psi - which shoots the pig through the hose and squeezes all that fuel back into the bulk tank. So, instead of having a mile of hose full of fuel, we just have a mile of hose full of rather high pressure air, much easier to get rid of. With all that air, we're estimating that it's still going to take about 20 minutes to drain the hose through a 2" vent at either end of the line. That's a LOT of air - and a bit noisy too! Pigging is a fairly standard procedure in the normal petrochemical world, but down here it's a totally different animal since we're using flexible hose instead of steel pipe, and instead of pushing the pig with a different kind of fuel, we're just using compressed air. Plus, this is Antarctica, things don't work as planned here. During the pigging process, the hose can literally thrash around in the air as the pig rockets through it, which isn't something you want to be close to. There's also the possibility that something could break, releasing an explosion of pressurized air, fuel, and whatever else happens to be in the area. Of course, since all that bad stuff could happen, we take a lot of precautions. When the line is pressurized, nobody gets anywhere near it. The person running the compressor is the closest to the scene, but they're far enough away that we need to use binoculars to watch the pressure gauges.

Reeling up the hose is a fairly straightforward process, we basically break the long hose apart into shorter sections (still on the order of 1,800 feet each,) put caps on the end of those, then reel them up onto those giant orange reels that I was unrolling when we put down the Willy hose a couple weeks ago.

So, I guess that's all I can think of to post for now. Will definitely post pictures and such when I can get them!

Strapping the Willy hose

2005-12-17T16:37:00.000+13:00

Finally got a little time to spend in front of a screen and write a little bit about strapping 6" fuel hose, which is one of the things I've been working on this week. When you're in Antarctica, pretty much anything that you put on the surface of the snow will change the way the wind moves snow in that area, which will then create snow drifts. Since our fuel hose sits on the surface of the snow, it eventually drifts and would get buried if we didn't do something about it. So, a few times per season we will 'strap' the hose, which basically means pull the hose out of the snow and put it back down on the surface. We accomplish this by wrapping a big tow strap around the hose, hooking that to some sort of vehicle (in recent years, it's been a Pisten Bully, but before that it was either a Spryte or a beefy snowmobile,) then very very carefully driving along beside the hose dragging it a foot or so to the side. We have to be super careful since the fuel line is full of fuel -1.5 gallons for every foot of hose- and if we ran over the hose, it would likely rupture and cause a fuel spill. There are also connections along the way to contend with, drifts of snow that have to be dug out, curves, slack, and several other little issues. Overall, the process is a lot of fun, but it does require quite a lot of care, concentration, and hard work. Here are a couple pictures of what the process looks like:

Also been working on lots of other fuels stuff. We had our last two flights arrive at the ice runway late last night and leave this morning. The runway and roads in the area are getting covered over with melt pools, which are basically puddles on the surface of the sea ice. The ice itself is still pretty strong, it holds up C130s, but it is a bit spooky to know that you're driving on a layer of ice above a bunch of very cold water and then hit a puddle. I've also done a little more woodworking stuff, some fuel transfers, and other random tasks lately. The station is getting geared up for Christmas, complete with decorations on the telephone poles and garland inside buildings. Looking forward to having an extra day off! That's all for now.

Weirdest conversations down here

2005-12-15T21:41:00.001+13:00

Sitting in the coffee house with a couple friends after a particularally interesting day at work, just heard one random bit of conversation that struck me as being really funny:

"It's not like a paramecium. Not nearly as mild. It goes after things."

Crazy mix of scientists, roughnecks, and everyone in between down here.

Will write more on what I've been up to at work and post pictures too, but need to get going so I guess that's all for now!

McMuddo update

2005-12-12T18:37:00.000+13:00

So, the bike race was a blast, and I surprisingly managed not to take a single spill or get too sore from it! Didn't try to figure out exactly what place I came in, but it was somewhere right near the middle of the 22 contender field. We only had about a dozen working bikes, so the race was done in two heats with a Lemond style start for each. We lined up on foot, ran about a hundred feet to an orange cone and back, grabbed a random bike, set the seat, and took off! I'm really out of cycling shape, and with the unfamiliar bike and sometimes sketchy and often steep terrain, the race didn't go too terribly fast. Most of us were in costume (same one as Halloween for me,) and a good time was had by all! After the race, I ate and visited with friends, took a nap, then played a bit of frisbee golf before spending the rest of the evening at Gallagher's.

Did end up working out at Willy Field most of today (driving Scharen around fueling up the runway buildings and generator,) but unfortunately the LDB launch was cancelled again. The plan is for them to keep trying pretty much every day until they get ideal weather for the launch. Should be able to see the balloon from McMurdo since it's something like 800 feet tall, but I'd still like to see the launch from relatively closeup.

So, that's about all the news that's worth writing about here, so I'll finish with a couple pictures from the last few days:

Muddy road in McMurdo - I live in "Mammoth Mountain Inn" - the building with the blue sign	Dan's amazing recovery (and costume!) after riding down the stairs in our cyclocross race

2005-12-11T10:26:00.000+13:00

Well, the LDB launch was cancelled for today and will hopefully be happening tomorrow evening. Very good thing potentially as I might be working out at Willy Field anyhow, which is right next to where the launch site is. Bike race begins in under an hour!

2005-12-10T21:16:00.000+13:00

Kind of bummed - sounds like the big balloon launch will be held at about the same time that the cyclocross race starts tomorrow. There's only going to be one other long duration balloon launched this season, so I'll have to make it to the next one! That's all for now.

I'm still alive!

2005-12-09T22:47:00.000+13:00

Been busy with all kinds of random small stuff lately, and haven't been too motivated to sit on a computer and type either. Things at work have been relatively slow as there aren't any big projects going on really. The next big thing will be rolling up the ice runway hose, which -if the ice agrees to do what we think it will- won't take place for another week and a half or so. The reeling process is fairly interesting, but I don't really have time to discuss it in detail right now. Basically, we first get all the hose on the surface of the snow, then fire a foam rubber bullet called a pig through the hose with a giant air compressor (over a mile of 6" rubber hose with 160psi of air pressure - what could possibly go wrong!?) to get most of the fuel out of the hose, then we unhook sections of it and finally roll it all up. One of the things I've done over the last few days was come up with a rough idea and then helped put together a little sled attachement for the reeling up phase of that project, at the bottom of this post is a picture of that.

The bulldozer picture is a "Stretch D8," which is an big, old (old as in 1950s) bulldozer that's one of the main heavy movers we use down here. It's the second strongest (I think) bulldozer we have (next to the much more modern d8r,) but it has a massive amount of traction and can still pull very hard. The stretches are much like regular D8s that were custom made for the Antarctic program by cutting them apart in the middle and stretching them out (like a limo,) then extending the axles out to accomodate much wider tracks. These modifications were made to allow the dozer's weight to be spread over a much larger area - allowing it to drive over softer surfaces like snow. These machines are really old and tired, but the guys in the heavy shop treat them like their children and keep them running, which is a good thing as some things we do down here (like moving runway buildings) lean very heavily on our little stretch fleet (I think we have 3 that are running, maybe 4.)

The buildings are part of the LDB (Long Duration Balloon) launch facility down here, and were incidentally pulled to their current location near Willy Field using -you guessed it- Stretch d8s. Hopefully there will be a balloon launch sometime with the next few days and I'll be able to get pictures and an explanation posted. Long Duration Balloons are really nifty, and very very big. From memory, the balloons are something like 800 feet tall, 400 feet wide, and can stay afloat for about a month!

This Sunday I'll be competing in the third annual McMurdo cyclocross race, which should be a lot of fun. It's a 2 mile race around town over our very loose, sandy, gravel roads. The bikes are all nearly identical and haven't been available to the public here yet (the same ones I got to work on a couple weeks ago,) so we're all going to be starting on pretty level ground gear wise. Anyways, that's all for now, hopefully will get some more stuff posted here this weekend.

Things that go VROOM!

2005-12-04T13:33:00.000+13:00

Q:just ran across your blog doing the random search thing. very cool
stuff. i'd read somewhere one of the first expeditions there in the
1920s or 1930s left behind a big 4 wheel vehicle. too big to bring
back so they buried it. heard about that story?

how come no comments on the site d00d?
-factory peasant

A:Thanks! I don't use the usual blogger comment system basically because I want this site to be kid friendly so that teachers can use it in middle schools and similar places. Since I've been down here, blogger has added comment moderation, but I haven't had a chance to look at how that works and whether it would be a good system for me to use on this site. Our net connection is very very slow (it takes me at least 10 minutes to upload each of the pictures you see here, usually longer,) and I stay pretty busy so the site will probably stay as it is at least until I get back to the states.

I think I do have an idea of what that big 4 wheel vehicle you're mentioning was. In Scott's last expedition on the Terra Nova (1910-1912), they took some modified farm tractors that were going to be used for hauling sledges. Those tractors didn't do too well - they had lots of mechanical failures, one fell through the ice, and they didn't handle the cold and snow very well in general. As far as I know, those tractors were some of the first vehicles used on the continent.

But, Scott's farm tractors probably aren't what you're referring to, but rather "Byrd's Big Bertha", which was a giant vehicle something like an overland aircraft carrier built in the late 30s. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of information floating around on the 'net about it, but if you do a search for "Antarctic Snow Cruiser" or "Byrd big bertha," you'll run across some info on it. The vehicle was huge - over 55 feet long, nearly 20 feet wide, weighed 30 tons, drove 2 miles per gallon (diesel,) 10 foot diameter tires, etc. It carried a special Beechcraft Staggerwing airplane on top, and had living quarters on the inside. The snow cruiser was a bit of a failure - one of the main factors was that the giant goodyear tires were too slick and pushed up little ridges of snow in front of the front wheels, which eventually would get the vehicle stuck until they dug out the wheels. The cruiser was eventually abandoned in Little America around the beginning of world war two. Nobody is sure where the cruiser is now, it was last seen in 1962 when a group went out to explore Little America and excavated the snow cruiser's garage there. Later in that decade, a big chunk of the ice shelf split off and drifted north, but nobody is sure which chunk of the split the cruiser was on.

Byrd's Big Bertha:

And, some more modern vehicles in use down here:

A Challenger bulldozer. Challengers aren't as strong as our custom stretched D8 Dozers (I'll get some pictures of one of those later - super cool bulldozers,) but with their rubber treads they can drive smooth and fast, and still pull pretty hard.	An older Nodwell converted for use as a runway fire truck.

Weekend!

2005-12-03T18:05:00.000+13:00

Lots of things going on at work lately, but not a lot interesting stories about them. We've been moving the runway fueling stuff from the Ice Runway out to Willy Field, which thankfully has been a pretty uneventful process so far. We're making the move in stages so that the airplane fueling capacity is uninterrupted, which makes things a little tricky at times. The aft pumphouse at ice runway (we have two pumphouses, they're designated fore and aft when they're in the same place) was taken down on Wednesday and drug out to Willy Field (it's on skis as are most buildings that live out of McMurdo) on Wednesday night. After the pumphouse was hooked up on Thursday, we started unhooking a couple of the tanks at the ice runway, which were then supposed to get moved out to Willy last night, but that didn't happen for some reason. Yesterday we hooked up and tested a pump sled at the ice runway that usually gets used out at Pegasus (our white ice runway, which isn't in use at the moment) to serve the minimal fueling needs at the ice runway and unhooked the fore pits. That was interesting as we had a bit of a windstorm come up, which kicked up a good bit of snow and had visibility down to the 40' range at times (see picture below.) Willy field is now our primary airfield, as most of the runway buildings are either there or in transit. Hopefully by Monday we'll only have one plane using the ice runway, which is the Kiwi C130 cargo plane that will be operating there until the 10th since it doesn't have skis and therefore can't land at Willy Field.

Today was a day full of lots of small projects; started out with improving our "spinner" for rolling 6" hose onto the big reels (thing holding up the hose in the foreground below,) then using it to reel a few hundred feet hose onto one of those giant orange reels, then worked on putting up some (dumb) signs to remind people that they need to pay attention to their nozzle when fueling vehicles (reactionary thing prompted by somebody being dumb and spilling about 20 gallons of diesel fuel the other day since they weren't paying attention,) shoveled a fair amount of snow, emptied out some 2-cycle oil jugs that we had accumulated, and all kinds of smaller tasks. Here are some pictures:

Top-Left:Brian and I rolling up a bunch of hose in the fuels barn.
Top-Right:Standing on Scharen
Bottom-Left:Doc working on the Pegasus sled in a storm
Bottom-Right:LC-130 taking off from Ice Runway.

Cookie Day!

2005-11-30T12:12:00.000+13:00

Sorry for the recent lull in interesting posts! We had an internet outage down here Sunday and Monday, so I wasn't able to play catchup with this thing, digital pictures, email, etc.

Thanksgiving was a blast, I ate an incredibly tasty meal at 7pm (we ate in shifts 3pm, 5pm, or 7pm depending on what you signed up for,) then was Molly's guest for the midrats Thanksgiving at midnight. Had the usual Thanksgiving standbys - turkey, cornbread, stuffing, potatoes, cranberries, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, salad, shrimp (yummy!,) and I'm sure plenty things that I've forgotten to mention. Lots of good conversation with fun people to go with the meal, which really made the evening. Was also able to get a phone line out and chat with family at home, which was nice! The time difference between here and the states means that for me to call people at a reasonable hour I have to get up extra early on workdays (yeah right,) or get lucky and grab a line out sometime between breakfast and lunch, which is usually when I'm busy at work - kind of a pain but it's a harsh continent as they say.

Work wise, we've been doing a fair amount of cleanup work and getting things prepped for moving our fueling stuff from the ice runway out to willy field in addition to the usual Fule Mule and Delta Scharen runs. Had an interesting experience while transferring a bunch of fuel down to the ice runway the other day. I was sitting on top of the runway tank we were filling to monitor the fuel levels and noticed that the level was rising consistently, then stopped. At about the same time on the radio, Patrick said that the line had gone flat where he was inspecting it. Soon after, Wendy said her section of line went flat as well. Fortunately, all that had happened was that our 2 million gallon bulk tank had hit 'invert' or the point that there isn't enough fuel left in the bottom to drain anymore out. We still had about a foot and a half of fuel in the bottom, and our documentation said that invert should have happened at more like a foot (a difference of tens of thousands of gallons.) The thing that made us get a little tense was that the symptoms at first looked like what you'd see if the line ruptured, but we quickly were able to establish that nothing was really wrong - we were just out of gas. Switched over to a nearly full bulk tank and were shortly back in business.

Also, yesterday I finally had a good opportunity to try out the bamboo flag puller on some frozen in flags in the area where we fill the fuel trucks up. The concept definitely works well - it easily pulled some flags that we couldn't budge by hand or with a hammer (one of the usual techniques is to whack the top of the flag with a hammer to break it loose, then pull it out by hand,) but the gripper mechanism slipped on the smooth bamboo with a couple that were stuck super hard. I'm going to try making some slight modifications to the gripper soon and see if we can't yank out the remaining flags with it then!

So, what's cookie day? It's pretty simple really - every Wednesday the galley staff cooks up a whole bunch of cookies and serves them up at lunch as a special treat. Usually there are 5 or so varieties and they're all really tasty. I like cookie day!

Long Weekend!

2005-11-26T09:27:00.000+13:00

So, the Turkey Trot was cancelled due to unsafe road conditions caused by a bit of new snow that we got last night. Kind of a bummer, but it'll probably get rescheduled for later so it's not that big of a deal. In the meantime, here's a picture of some of the other fuelies that I work with warming up in the Ice Runway warmup shack the other day:

L to R:Matt, Jodie, David, Clare, Jon, and Patrick's left arm.

Kaboom!

2005-11-25T10:58:00.000+13:00

Been working on lots of little things around the fuels barn lately - organizing and taking inventory of one of our storage pads, cutting up and drying a bunch of bad hoses to get rid of them, fixing small things, etc. Today we've got a short day because there's an "all hands" meeting at 3pm, so we're getting off early for that. We have Saturday off for Thanksgiving (Thanksgiving in Antarctica happens the Saturday after Thanksgiving in the states,) then Sunday off to recover from having Saturday off (or just because we don't usually work on Sundays.) Looking forward to having some play time - planning on running in the annual "Turkey Trot," which is a 5K run/walk race that winds around town, out onto the sea ice, then back through town. Should be fun! Of course we have a big thanksgiving meal (might end up being two for me if I eat with the night shift people too!) and all that, which everybody on station is looking forward to. No plans other than that, but I'm sure that there won't be a lot of sitting around since there's always a bunch of stuff to do on weekends around here. Next week should be busy since we'll be moving a bunch of equipment from the ice runway out to willy field and setting it up there. There's been some road construction work going on just out of town, which has been neat to watch. Here's a picture someone else took of a blast yesterday that I got to see from up in the tank farm. When the blast went off, the shockwave went through our big solid fuel pipes around town and made all kinds of weird noises up at the farm - hard to describe, but it was neat!

Wood projects

2005-11-21T19:44:00.000+13:00

Not a lot worth writing about going on in the fuels world over the last few days. Had a nice weekend; did a bunch of laundry, cleaned up things a bit, fixed some bikes, ate some food, and slept a lot. I've also been working on looking up college scholarship stuff on the net, hopefully will get around to writing some essays and such over the next few weeks. Here are a couple pictures of little woodworking projects I've done down here. First is the bamboo flag puller experiment (for breaking flags loose that are frozen in place,) to the right is a little shelf I built that clings onto the side of my dresser.

2005-11-20T17:11:00.000+13:00

Don't have time to post much right now, but things have been going well. We've made it to the slow(ish) week or so of the year when we've got the Willy Field stuff ready for the move, but the ATO people aren't quite ready to move off the Ice Runway. All the large projects that need to be done for now are done, so we're in the bit of time that was scheduled for playing catchup in case things didn't go as smoothly as they have so far. I've been working on various smallish projects - finished my bamboo flag puller (haven't tested it yet, but will post results when they're available,) did some fuel delivery stuff on the Fule Mule and Scharen, helped out with some cleanup things, and that's about it! Have today off, so I slept in late, had a nice long brunch, then helped the recreation people with tuning up our station bicycles in preperation for the bike race that'll be run in a week or two. Had a good time doing that, especially the test ride part :). Also got around to reorganizing some of my pictures and stuff onto CDs and ran across a picture of Scharen in action! In addition to Scharen, you can see Mt. Erebus (our local active volcano) pretty well in this picture. It's hard to get the scale of things in this picture, but the tires are about 5 feet in diameter for perspective:

Scharen!

2005-11-18T11:49:00.000+13:00

Work last Wednesday was a lot of fun! Started out the morning with helping to set valves at the pumphouse to do our first transfer of fuel out to the tanks at Willy field. For this particular transfer, we used two of out big electric pumps. First, we used a (relatively) smaller pump to get the system primed and make sure everything along the line was working well, then we switched over to the really big pump.

It's pretty impressive when the switch gets thrown to turn on the big pump in general, especially impressive when you're pumping fuel from somewhere lower than the pump as we were. Before turning the pump on, you have to open the valves in line with the pump to keep from "deadheading" (pumping fuel into a closed line) and breaking things, but when you open all the valves like that, the fuel that's left in the line (hundreds or thousands of gallons) flows downhill and will start the pump spinning backwards if it's not turned on. So, what we do is essentially get all the downstream valves open except for one right by the pump. Then, one person (me in this case) starts frantically opening that valve while another person stands by the "on" switch. Once the valve is halfway open, the pump is spinning backwards fairly quickly (nowhere near how fast it can go backwards if allowed to) and the switch is turned on. The lights brown out, the floor shudders, the air is filled with a really loud groaning sound, and everything rattles as the big electric motor comes on line, stops the fuel from flowing backwards, starts pushing it the right way at a rate of around 500 gallons per minute (8.3 gallons get moved every second.) Now, as all this is happening, remember that the person at the valve has to keep on going as fast as they can to get it open all the way so that fuel can flow smoothly out from the pumphouse. Neat experience, don't think I can do it justice in writing.

So, after getting the pump going, I walked the hard pipe from the pumphouse out towards Scott Base to confirm everything was in good shape. Nice walk - we had beautiful weather and firm crust on the snowfields. As expected, the fuel line was in good shape, so I hitched a ride back to McMurdo with a passing communications tech, got dropped off in town, then had lunch.

After lunch was the really neat stuff - I got to drive our fuels Delta, Scharen, for the first time! Scharen is a 1986 Foremost Delta II with a roughly 1800 gallon fuel tank on the back connected to a reversible positive displacement PTO pump. There was a picture (here) posted on here a while back of me standing beside one of the wheels. Basically, Scharen is our fuel delivery truck for delivering fuel outside of McMurdo. She's also used for a variety of fuelie tasks in town since her pump is reversible (unlike the Fule Mule's - our in town truck - which can only discharge fuel.) Our first task was to drive out to the Pegasus runway, which on Scharen is about a 45 minute drive from town in good conditions like we were experiencing. Had a blast learning how to drive the delta, although it's controls are very similar to a regular car's, it does take some getting used to. The floorboard is about 5 or 6 feet off the groun, it bends in the middle for steering (so you can smash the sides into things when it's not moving if you're not careful,) and it's BIG. Even though the delta is so huge and heavy (roughly 25 tons with an empty tank,) it can turn sharper than most regular cars I've driven since it bends in the middle to steer.

Anyways, Matt and I drove around filling various tanks around Pegasus Field, the Ice Runway, and a D8 Bulldozer out near Scott Base until about an hour and a half after we were supposed to stop working (had more to do than usual.) Had a bunch of fun, and we came up with a plan to put a CD player and stereo in the Delta - going to run the idea past my boss and see what he thinks about it.

That's all for now, I'm driving the Fule Mule today and need to get back to it since my lunch break is nearly over. Will try to get some Scharen Action Shots posted on here later.

Nothing much new

2005-11-15T21:21:00.000+13:00

Spent a lot of Monday doing fancy plumbing type stuff out at Willy field getting the tanks setup. Basically hooking valves, tanks, and a special filter called a coalescer (sucks water out of fuel in case there is condensation in the fuel system) together sections of 4 inch "Arctic Blue" hose and retightening bolts on all the flange fittings on the tanks. Things went fairly smoothly, except radio comms - an issue that's becoming a recurring theme. By the end of the day we had things setup to the point that we can transfer fuel from our bulk tanks in town all the way out to the runway storage tanks using that hose that I was working on. Here is a map that got sent out to all the residents of McMurdo showing the willy hose and the snow roads in that area overlaid against an aerial picture of the area:

Today seemed kind of laid back as it was happening, but in hindsight we got a lot of stuff done. Guess that's what efficiency is all about :) Moved a whole bunch (in the hundreds of thousands of gallons) of fuel between two of our bulk storage tanks, drained the line between the two of them when that was done, and filled up the Ice Runway tanks while the bulk transfer was going on. Of course, those are each pretty big tasks and there were several of us working on them at the same time, it wasn't just me singlehandedly setting valves, dipping tanks, and running the big electric pump! Which brings up some interesting little bits of info about how we do things down here, like how do we tell how much fuel is in one of these big tanks?

Unlike the fuel tank in a car or even an airplane, the tanks we use don't typically have a gauge that tells how much fuel is in them. We do have a few smaller tanks that do have gauges, but those are horribly inconsistent due to the harsh environment down here and generally bad design of these particular gauges (unfortunately, the fuels department doesn't get to choose exactly what tanks get purchased for some uses - these are a shining example of why that's not so good.) So, what do we use then? A dip tape! A dip tape is a pretty simple device, and is the most reliable and efficient way to measure fuel down here. In principle, they work a lot like the dipstick that you use to measure oil in a car engine, but instead of being a stick, it's a roll of thin metal with graduations on it (just like on a regular measuring tape.) Attached to the end of the metal band is a bob (some of these have a thermometer that we need to use when measuring large quantities of fuel) to make the tape sink down to the bottom of the tank. To use a dip tape, you climb up to the top of the tank and unroll the dip tape down into a port on the top of the tank. When you feel the bob touch bottom (very very gently! If you let too much tape out, you'll get an inaccurate reading,) you stop reeling it out and start reeling in the tape. If there's any fuel in the tank, part of the tape will be wet with it when you reel in the tape. You can then just look at the line of fuel and read the numbers on the tape to know how deep the fuel is in the tank. If you need to know how many gallons of fuel are in the tank, you compare the depth of the fuel with a chart that's made for that particular tank to get the number of gallons of fuel you're working with. It's a nifty little system that takes a bit of practice, but once you've got it down it's no problem to figure out how much fuel you're dealing with whether it's a 200 gallon tank or a 2.2 million gallon one!

Finally, I was just goofing around looking through some of the shared pictures folder down here and ran across a picture of some fuel drums about to get airdropped out of the back of an LC-130 over the WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet) fieldcamp site - there's nothing there yet but snow and things that got tossed out the back of this plane. The drums are strapped in groups of 4 onto pallets cushioned with several inches of corrugated cardboard padding stuff, then a parachute (in the green bags you can see on top) is strapped on top. The plane flies over the site, the drums get shoved off the back, and if all goes well they land unbroken on the snow ready for people like my friend Trevor to show up and help get the camp up and running. Trevor's been waiting to get down to WAIS for over a month now, but nobody's managed to get a good enough weather window to fly from McMurdo and land on the ground (in an LC130 - C130 with giant skis and JATO bottles) at WAIS. If you look closely to the right of the red diamond sticker, you can even see some of my lousy handwriting!

Slow Sunday

2005-11-13T12:48:00.000+13:00

Finally, it's Sunday! Slept in late, had a nice waffle brunch, took care of some errands, then hopped on the computer! The weather here in McMurdo improved a lot overnight, the ice runway has opened back up, visibility is at several miles, and everywhere around here is condition 3. The plan for today is to continue being lazy, then go to a science lecture tonight after dinner.

Yesterday after posting on here, I ended up working on building a bamboo flag puller at the fuels barn. The problem is that we use hundreds of flags made of a bit of colored cloth tied to a bamboo pole to mark things on the ice around here. Sometimes we can plant flags just by shoving them into the snow, other times we have to use an auger to drill a hole to drop the flag into. After sitting in the snow/ice for a few weeks or months, the bamboo often freezes in and can be nearly impossible to pull out. So, what I'm building is basically a little thing that grips the bamboo mounted a third of the way up a long handle. This thing should give a person a bit of mechanical advantage allowing one person to pull up really hard on a flag and break it loose without having to pull really hard on the handle (mechanical advantage.) We'll see how it goes, I haven't seen anything comparable in use down here, so I guess there's a chance that there is a good reason why nobody has done it yet. Will post pictures when it's done.

And, just for a little bit of Antarctic trivia, here's what some flag colors mean:

Red/Green: Used to mark roads or trails. The two colors are usually interchangeable except on a couple of the big roads around here where they are used to designate lanes.

Blue: Marks fuel related stuff - usually fuel line or hose.

Yellow: Pee flag - marks a place that it's okay to pee on the ground to keep things from getting nasty all over the place. You don't usually see these around town since we've got plumbing in most of the buildings, they tend to be more common in field camps and places far from buildings.

Black: Caution! Black flags are used to close off certain dangerous areas like crevasses, closed roads, high power antennas (we've got some antennas - well away from town - that will fry your brain if you get too close,) or similar nasty stuff.

Flags are usually placed vertically standing alone in a line with other flags to mark routes. If there's a change in a route like a turn or end, you will often see two flags place diagonally forming an X. For instance, on the long fuel hoses that we lay (like the one to Willy Field that I've been working on) we have a single vertical flag every 50 feet along the hose (over 5 miles, that's a LOT of flags,) with two crossed flags marking connections (the hose is made up of many sections that average around 3-400 feet each connected together,) and three flags (two crossed and one vertical) marking the border between two reels (average length of a reel is about 1,800 feet) of hose.

2005-11-12T12:29:00.000+13:00

So, we finally managed to get the hose out to Willy field done yesterday! Next part of the project is getting a skeleton fueling system up and running so that we can fuel planes if we have to before the ice runway move (scheduled for December 2 or so, but some people think it might happen sooner.) Once the ice runway is closed, we will move the rest of our fueling stuff from it over to willy field, making it fully operational. Will try to document that process as it happens.

Today we've got some more funky weather. Woke up to a couple inches of new snow, thankfully without too much wind or really cold temperatures. Most of the day so far has been a little windy with low visibility, so we've been taking care of little tasks in the barn. That's all for now.

Fun Stuff!

2005-11-10T20:45:00.000+13:00

Man, things have been busy lately! The net connection is going pretty slow right now, so I'm not going to be able to post many pictures, but there are some good new ones in the works!

The last few days have mostly centered around laying the hose to Williams (willy) field, with some fuel transfers thrown in for good measure. Tuesday was a bit different in that pretty much nothing went smoothly. First, our Pisten Bully wouldn't start, so we weren't able to lay much hose. We tried improvising and running hose without a mobile bully, but soon discovered that one of the hose reels was jammed. Managed to get that straightened out with the help of a big prybar, then headed off for lunch. Got back from lunch expecting to find one of our mechanics fixing the bully, but before we even got there, we found a truck without a driver apparently stuck off the road. As we were investigating this truck, we noticed that someone had unhooked our bulldozer from the hose reel trailer and was driving it towards the pickup. It was soon apparent that either the driver of the dozer wasn't very good at it or the dozer was having some mechanical problems. We ran down the bulldozer, and found out that the driver was our mechanic, who had driven out thinking that he could use our tracks as a road to get to the pisten bully and had gotten himself stuck. It was also revealed that the dozer did in fact have a bit of a personality, so we had our operator drive it to the mechanic's truck, tie up, and drag the truck cross country over to where the pisten bully was stuck. We opened up the pisten bully (neat process - will post pics at some point) and used a Herman Nelson ("15 gallon gas tank that you can light the top of") to heat up the engine. It was a particularly cold and windy day, so the pisten bully's builtin heater wasn't up to keeping the engine at starting temp, so once we warmed it up a bit it started right up. Now that we had all our mechanical problems sorted out, the mechanic's truck was drug back to the road and we tried in vain to lay hose. To add insult to injury, the base radio unit at the fuels control center was down, so we weren't able to do anything anyhow! All in all, about 10 new feet of hose made it on the ground and we were able to plant one marker flag...

Wednesday, we had much more success and spent all day efficiently laying hose down. Some small changes were made to our arrangement, so we ended up unrolling 4 full reels of hose (on the order of 2,000 feet each) to land about 35-40 feet short of our destination. We had a nice lunch out at willy field rather than driving all the way back to McMurdo for lunch, which was a nice experience. On the way back to the barn at the end of the day, I was really looking forward to getting home, changing into some clean, dry clothes, and eating some food though. To my complete surprise I got to the barn and Bodie said I would have to stay later to prepare to go to a fuel cache and take samples tomorrow! yay! Helicopter ride for Ian!!!

Thursday - today - has been a blast! Took care of some small last minute stuff this morning, then headed down to the helopad to catch my bird out to the Darwin Glacier, which is pretty much the farthest out point that helicopters go from McMurdo. We were going out there to take samples from a fuel cache in order to verify that the fuel contained in the barrels was still usable and in good condition. Also, since the cache had likely drifted over, we needed to dig the drums out of the snow and place them back on the surface so that they could be used when needed. These caches are placed in several strategic locations around the continent to allow helicopters or ski planes to stop out in the field and get fuel in case they are forced down or are out on an extended trip for some reason. They each get inspected once a year, and I was lucky enough to be doing one of the inspections this year!

I was going with five other people; the pilot, the helitech, Jodie (one of the other fuelies,) and two guys out on a 'boondoggle.' Boondoggles are pretty much the only way that people get to go off base if they work a 'town job' and are a very special treat. Basically what happens is a few extra people are sometimes needed to head out to field camps or whatever to help out with basic tasks. Rather than having a special labor pool for those tasks, seats are handed out to each department to pass down to people who win a break from their normal jobs. Our two helpers usually work for the supply department and the utilities department, and were coming along to help Jodie and I with excavating the drums and any other tasks that we would need to accomplish in the field.

We each had our bags, tools, and bodies put on a scale to help figure out how much fuel to take, then we were given a quick briefing on flying in a helicopter (this one was a Bell 212,) fitted for flight helmets, etc. Once the chopper was ready, we were lead out onto the pad and boarded the helicopter. Takeoff took a few minutes as the helicopter needed a little time to warm up (which is usual for the first flight of the day,) but soon we were in the air and headed out towards the distant mountains that you may have seen in some of my pictures here! About an hour (and loads of amazing scenery) later, we touched down on what appeared to be nothing but a big snowfield with a few tattered blue flags sticking out in a rectangle. After a bit of digging, we struck gold! We struck orange actually, but in any case we found one of the drums. With a little more exploratory digging, we had figured out where the edges of the cache were and uncovered each of the 30 drums that it was comprised of. Fortunatly, the drums hadn't "iced in," so we only had to uncover the top half of them and were able to use the helicopter to pluck them out of the hole and put them down on the surface a short distance away. The plucking process was 45 minutes of incredible flying that was really neat to watch, and a little chilly too. Once the chopper was done moving drums, the pilot landed and shut it down and we set to work taking notes (Jodie,) drawing samples (me,) and rearranging the drums (the helitech and boondogglers.) The old flags were planted back around the refurbished cache, we loaded up, and we were soon back in the air! The flight back to McMurdo was really cool, but I was rather tired and the rhythmic noises of the rotor put me to sleep for part of the ride. We got back to town about 6pm, took our tools and samples back to the fuels barn, then headed off to dinner and the 'net!

Ian's Pictures:

Pics Tim took:

2005-11-06T13:32:00.000+13:00

More of the usual Willy hose stuff over the last couple days. Spent the remainder of Friday working on the hose project, and then all of Saturday. Got a bunch of hose done, so that was neat. I've pretty much been in charge of marking the line, so my arms are pretty sore from drilling hundreds of holes in the snow/ice with a gas powered auger to plant blue bamboo flags every 50 feet to mark the hose. Also built a bridge across the line for a snowmobile crossing, which was a fun little project. We've been working with Matt (one of three Matts involved in this project) from the safety department, which has been interesting. The cool thing about Matt is that rather than just looking at what we're doing and making policy changes, he comes out and actually works with us to better understand the job and make it safer. It's been fun to see his perspective on things and what could be changed, although it sounds like he thinks we're doing things about as safely and efficiently as possible. One thing that I found a little amusing is that "safety Matt"'s two big hobbies are martial arts and skydiving. He says skydiving is one of the safest sports out there because you'll only ever mess up once.

After working on the willy hose on Saturday, I got changed into some normal clothes, ate, then visited with friends at the cafe learning how to play cribbage. Neat little game - think I'm starting to get the hang of it! Spent some time doing laundry and cleaning up the room a bit. Think I'm going to scrounge around for some wood to build some furniture to get more storage space sometime.

So far this Sunday I've slept in, eaten a nice waffle breakfast, read some in my new book "The Dancing Wu-Li Masters" (it's about quantum physics - not crazy dancing guys,) and spent some time on the computer as is usual when these posts get posted. Did get a couple pictures added here:

Working with reels of hose on a Challenger trailer	Jody and John goofing around by the "golf ball" (a radar installation above town) - those buildings are McMurdo

2005-11-04T12:09:00.000+13:00

So, it's been a few days since I've had time and a solid net connection to post here. Kind of short on time at the moment, so this will be a brief update, hopefully with more detail and/or some pictures coming later.

Tuesday was another nice weather day where I worked on laying the willy field hose. We got several hundred feet of hose on the ground, tested, and packed with fuel including running it through two bridges (so that equipment can cross the hose,) down a steep hill (but not too steep for the pisten bully!,) and a pair of valves (that let us isolate sections of the line and drain it out when it comes time to roll it back up next spring.) Had a good time working on that project and got a lot of stuff done too!

Wednesday the weather out was pretty bad, so we were going to take care of tasks around town instead of trying to go lay hose with stiff winds and very low visibility. The ice runway was closed too, so there were many more available fuelies than jobs. I was originally going to go out on the "fuel mule" to help out with fueling things around town, but was feeling the beginnings of a cold, so I talked to my supervisor, Bodie, who just told me to go home and rest rather than hanging around doing small stuff in the barn all day. Went back to the dorm, took a nap, read a bit, and was generally lazy.

Thursday the weather in town was iffy, but we headed out to the ice shelf (basically sea ice that doesn't get melted off annually, so it's really thick) to see what it looked like out there in case it was clear enough to continue on the project. Unfortunately, it was near whiteout conditions out on the ice, so we weren't able to do anything and turned around to head back to the fuels barn. Spent the evening working on various tasks including making some handles for the hundreds of files (of the metal cutting variety) we have around the shop without them, did some fuel deliveries with the Fuel Mule, and helped out with several other small projects. Nice day, and I'm feeling a lot better than Wednesday after a nice rest.

Friday - that's today! So far I've helped out with an ice runway transfer including a bunch of shoveling out the line after our wind the last few days. Just about to head out to the ice shelf to continue on with the hose lay project, will post more later!

Big machines!

2005-10-31T20:09:00.000+13:00

Fun day! Nearly perfect weather all day - warm and only a slight breeze all day long. Started out the morning with the morning meeting as usual, only this one took a fair amount longer since we went over willy hose lay stuff and were introduced to a safety guy who we'll be working with for the next few days. Supposedly, he's going to be helping out with the project to get a better idea of how to do it more ergonomically. This whole safety thing is part of the same one that says we can't lift more than 40Lbs without assistance or tools, or stand 4 feet above anything without fall protection gear. *cough* Great program *cough*. Anyways, it should at least be free labor, so that's cool. Next, Matt and I got back to work getting setup for the big hose lay project. I had to get a snowmobile from one side of the peninsula (near the ice runway) to the other (near Scott Base.) That entailed spending nearly an hour trying to get it to start, a few minutes of tweaking the carburetor settings to keep it going, then 45 minutes of driving! Probably a good thing that I was driving one of the ancient "Alpine 1's", which are designed more for pulling stuff than our new machine that has a speedo that goes to 130. After lunch we bolted a couple big sections of culvert together with the help of a Caterpillar 950 loader to get things lined up, directed the digging of a trench, put down some dunnage, lay in the culvert, and bury it with snow. Tomorrow we will be laying out the first several hundred feet of hose, including the section that will go through the culvert that we created today. Finished up the work day with gathering together small stuff for the hose lay and loading it into the Pisten Bully. Fun day!

What a weekend!

2005-10-30T18:39:00.000+13:00

Saturday was another busy day at work - spent the morning getting stuff ready to move out towards Willy Field, then the afternoon was another ice runway transfer and some more Willy prep stuff. We got out of work early since the Halloween party was Saturday night and we had an 'all hands' meeting in the galley. All hands meetings are realistically only attended by a fraction of the population down here, but the fuelies try to make it to them as a departmental thing. This one was mostly about the south pole traverse, which was pretty neat. Once the all hands meeting was over, I headed over to my room to grab a quick nap then get ready for the Halloween party. The party was a lot of fun - it was especially neat to see some of the elaborate costumes that people put together (or bring) down here! Stayed up pretty late visiting with friends, then headed back home to sleep.

Sunday has been a lazy lazy day. Lots of sleeping, reading (reading This Game of Ghosts, the sequil to Touching the Void - excellent book!), eating, surfing the 'net, etc. Found out that I'm in the biggest newspaper on the continent, the Antarctic Sun! The web version doesn't seem to be as updated as the print one is down here unfortunately, so I can't link directly to the article just yet (it's about happy camper school.) That's all for now, later!

Checking in

2005-10-28T12:46:00.000+13:00

Hey everyone! Been pretty busy over the last few days, so I haven't had a chance to write too much. Things have been going pretty well - lots of work and a fair amount of play too! The season is really starting to get rolling now, we've been doing fuel transfers pretty much every day, and several of the fuelies have been in and out getting to various field locations and the south pole station. Since the sea ice under the runway isn't very thick this year, we haven't been able to fill up our ice runway fuel tanks to full capacity, which is in turn forcing us to refil them every day now. Filling the runway tanks requres a few hours and five people, so between that and several other jobs we're getting a little stretched for people. The upside of doing a lot of runway transfers is that I've been able to work out on the ice a lot, and drive our snowmobile quite a bit! We use the snowmobile to inspect the soft fuel line as we're doing a transfer in case it starts leaking or whatever - it's a very important job, but pretty fun too! The other thing that's been taking up a fair amount of my time is helping to get ready for laying a hose from near Scott Base out to Willy Field next week.

Away from work, the station has been gearing up for Halloween! We had a really cool haunted house over in one of the warehouses yesterday, which was a blast. A lot of people have been working on their costumes, but fortunately I have one done already (simple thing - came from a thrift store in chch.) Also went bowling for the fuelie bowling team, which was a blast although I'm not very good at it. Have moved to a smaller dorm, and this one has a window! Can't think of anything else off the top of my head, so that's all for now - I'll try to post here more often in the future!

***Questions***

Q:What kind of warning system do you have for these big storms, if any? -Catherine
A:We've got a weather department down here that keeps track of what's going on and does their best to let us know what the weather will be doing before it happens. If the weather department is predicting bad stuff approaching, it gets broadcasted out over the radio so that everyone knows what's happening. Unfortunately, we don't have a bunch of weather monitoring stuff away from the station, so sometimes there isn't too much warning when the weather starts to change. One thing that's really neat about the location of McMurdo Station is that we can see for a long way in the direction that the storms usually come from, so we can just look out over the sea ice and see whether it's clear out there, or if there's a big cloud of blowing snow indicating winds approaching. Realistically, the biggest problem with storms is cleaning up the blown snow afterwards. If you're around base, you just sit inside and wait them out, or you wait in a vehicle if you happen to be outside when something happens.

It's windy out there!

2005-10-23T19:43:00.000+13:00

So, not much else to report for today. Been goofing around playing pool and watching movies mostly. Have a nice little storm going on outside - it's condition 2 here in McMurdo, but condition 1 pretty much everywhere else around here. Windchill in town is around -60F, and visibility is pretty slim as illustrated here. It's really gusty out (as in it's hard to manage an outside door by yourself,) but this picture really doesn't do it justice:

Slow day

2005-10-23T14:52:00.000+13:00

It's my day off, so I got to sleep in! Had brunch down in the galley, hung out with friends for a bit, read, then hopped on the computer! One thing that's really neat about the network down here is that the IT people provide some community space on one of their servers where people put pictures and such to share with other people down here. While I was looking around what was on the shared drive, I ran across this picture of the same Emperor Penguin that I got to see on sea ice training a few days ago:

2005-10-23T09:32:00.000+13:00

Saturday - Helped out with a big fuel transfer down to the ice runway storage tanks, plus some other smaller jobs. Had a good time sitting up above the heliport at the control valve watching helicopters take off and land, plus loads of activity down at the ice runway with LC-130s practicing landing and practicing touch-and-gos, a C-17 doing it's thing, and some Twin Otters arriving. Shoveled out a big section of our flexible hose as the transfer was happening to keep warm (although it's been a practically balmy 10*F out) and get something else done while watching the valve. Went over to the coffee house to watch open mic night, but that was the same plan that practically everyone else on station had so the place ran out of even standing room (see picture.) Learned how to play cribbage, which then disintegrated into building a house of cards, then watched Cold Mountain up in the lounge. Nice day!

It's Friday!

2005-10-21T18:46:00.000+13:00

Got a lot of stuff done at work today - some meeting type stuff, some paperwork type stuff, some fuelie stuff, and a little blogging stuff. We had a nifty little storm here today, nothing major but with enough wind to whip up snow and cut visibility way down. Unfortunately, I left my camera in my room and didn't get any pictures of that :(. Town never got worse than Condition 2, but some places like the ice runway were at Condition one!

Basically, we have three 'ratings' for how bad the weather is down here:

Condition 3: Ideal to slightly funky. Wind speed is less than or equal to 48 knots (roughly 55mph,) visibility is greater than 1/4 mile, and windchill temperature is greater than -75°F.

Condition 2: Funky. Wind speed is greater than 48 knots (~55mph) but less than or equal to 55 knots (~63mph,) or visibility is greater than 100 feet but less than or equal to 1/4 mile, or windchill temperature is greater than -100°F but less than or equal to -75°F. You don't want to be outside in condition 2

Condition 1: Really Funky. Wind speed is greater than 55 knots (63mph,) or visibility is less than or equal to 100 feet, or windchill temperature is less than or equal to -100°F. At condition 1, everyone except the S&R (Search and Rescue) people are required to stay put and not go outside at all.

So, before lunchtime, the storm had passed, the air was crystal clear and pretty warm (upper single digits/low teens!) Worked on some stuff around the fuels barn including learning how to work with fittings that go with our 6" diameter flexible "lay flat" hose. We'll be laying several miles of this stuff in a couple weeks, so we all had to get well acquainted with it to be able to help. Had lunch as usual, then back to work! I spent some time filling drums down at the heloport, took a look at a weird little filter sump (an external drain that lets you remove some of the junk that a filter catches) that I'm going to modify sometime soonish, then went back up to the shop. We had acquired a couple really big (12"X 20') sections of steel pipe with flanges on the end for making basically a culvert for fuel lines with. Unfortunately, in their last use these pipes had been covered with some weird insulation stuff that we had to remove in order to use them, so I helped out with that effort for a while. They were also packed up with snow, so David (one of the other fuelies) and I scrounged up a bumper jack, some big metal pans, and some big chunks of wood to prop the pipes up at an angle such that when the snow melts, it'll drain into the pans instead of our shop's floor. Fun work, might post a pic later if I remember to take the camera to work tomorrow.

So, here are some pictures of the last several days:

Busy busy busy

2005-10-20T18:48:00.000+13:00

....busy.

Monday was a really fun day - I got to work on the sea ice runway! The only plane coming in was a C17 carrying primarily people (including my friend Molly!) so it turned out that they didn't need to refuel at all. Nevertheless, we had to get our runway fueling system set up and ready to go in case they decided to take on some fuel, so I got trained up on that and helped set it up. While waiting for the plane after we had things ready to roll, I took our snowmobile out for a little drive to blow some crud out of it's carburetor. Those snowmobiles are fun little machines! So, the plane arrived as planned and didn't get any fuel- also as planned. Unfortunately, the airstrip people don't let us approach planes on the runway to greet people or anything, so I wasn't able to get over to the plane to say hi to everyone, but it was really cool to see the plane land on the sea ice, offload about a hundred and fifty little walking red blobs (everyone has to wear their big red parkas on flights,) take on some more cargo and PAX (as passengers are called - think it's an air force thing,) then rocket off into the sky! After closing down the fuel system, we went back up to the fuels barn, took care of some other stuff, and finally it was time to go to dinner! Met Molly in the galley at dinner and visited for a while. Went for a walk around McMurdo, watched some TV, then crashed for the evening.

Tuesday was another busy one, but it involved a TON more physical labor. Shoveled out some valves that were buried under some deep, crusty snow drifts near our big bulk tanks (the ones on the right side of that picture from last Sunday) with Bryan. Once that job was done, we cleaned up some construction debris from one of the other tank's containment berms. This stuff had apparently been blown up there in a storm several months ago, so we're not really sure where this big (10 feet by about 150 feet) rectangle of felt-like material came from. It was a major pain in the rear to dig out though! Imagine this giant chunk of material crunched up into a ball and wedged under some big fuel pipes, then fill all the voids with snow, pebbles, and ice. Now, imagine digging/pulling this thing out by hand... After that, we took off for lunch and did some small stuff around the fuels barn and a transfer to fill up the incinerator building (which doesn't hold an incinerator anymore, but still has that name) heater tank.

Wednesday started out with a little class by one of our station physical therapists about stretching and how to perform some heavy tasks safely. Raytheon has a (stupid) new rule that doesn't allow anyone to lift more than 40 pounds by themselves (I think we have a monkey wrench that is over 40 pounds, going to check up on that one soon,) which is a source of endless entertainment for many of us who work down here. A big part of the class was the PT trying to come up with ways for us to mount the blower motor onto our "hermie heaters" with two people. The blower motor ("hermie head," it's detachable so that we can keep the motor in a heated place when we're not using it) is something like 55lbs and goes in an awkward position so that only one person can realistically put it in. The PT basically ended up giving up. Lots of small tasks Wednesday as well, including my first mogas (regular unleaded gas, which we don't deal with too much) transfer and a lot of small maintenance stuff. Bodie (the fuels foreman - he's in charge of day-to-day operations basically) came out with the schedule for what each of us fuelies will be doing for the season. Unfortunately, it looks like I'll be in or around McMurdo all season - don't get to go work at the South Pole or any of the field camps (we've only got a couple camps this year, usually there are quite a few.) Although, I am a fuels operator now, so that's definitely better than the GA position that I had (which had very very slim odds of taking me out of McMurdo.) Molly had the day off to help her transition into working the night shift as she will be doing until Christmas, so I did my part by staying up late playing pool and random board games. Both of the two pool cues in the lounge here in Building 155 are really funky. They're both very straight aluminum cues, but the tip on one is cracked and the other is loose. Think I might label one "Infinite Improbability Cue" sometime later.

Today was another day full of smallish odd jobs. Been kind of groggy all day - didn't get nearly enough sleep after staying up so late and think I've got a little cold to boot. Spent a fair amount of time fixing a fitting on one of the relatively small (something like 2,000 gallons) building tanks. Got some funny looks walking through town toting two 3 foot monkey wrenches, but that's what happens when you're a fuelie! Also helped out with a transfer to fill up the power plant fuel tank and spent much of the evening filling 55 gallon drums at the heloport. Weather got overcast and a bit breezy today, 0 degrees sure feels a lot colder when it's combined with a fair bit of wind and a little blowing snow! Had dinner, started a load of laundry, then started typing this entry!

Will post some more pictures soon - think I've got some good ones from the ice runway on Monday!

***Questions***

Q:How much time will you spend out on the ice? Will it be free time or
work time? -Larrey
A:Not sure exactly how much time I'll spend out on sea ice, but probably not too much. We got our finalized (as final as it gets) season fuels schedule done the other day and by the time I've got airfield shifts (we rotate through airfield duty every 3 weeks or so) the ice runway will have melted. At that point we'll be using Willy Field, which is an airstrip we use on the ice shelf (permanent ice) when the sea ice melts enough that we can't safely land planes on it. I can go out on the sea ice recreationally on the road that leads to the ice runway (something like a mile and a half,) or for work. The only work I'll likely be doing out there will be helping to take apart the fuel system we have out there to move parts of it out to Willy Field when we make the move.

Q:How is the food? -Mom
A:Pretty good! As you might imagine, we don't get a lot of fresh food down here, so most of it is either dehydrated or frozen food, but the cooks tend to do a really good job. Fresh food (freshies) sometimes comes down on flights from New Zealand along with other stuff, and is regarded as a treat by most people down here. My favorite treat is the soft serve machine that's in the galley right beside the coffee machine. Whoever came up with that idea was a genius!

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!!

2005-10-16T20:10:00.000+13:00

So, after that last post, I scrounged around Mactown (as we often call McMurdo) and found a sheet, a strip of wood, and a couple cotangers (coat hangers) to make a little privacy curtain in my room so that it's easier to regulate light when I'm trying to sleep. The project went smoothly and I think it'll be rather effective! Met up with John and hiked up Ob Hill (Observation Hill - ~750' mountain right by town.) Slippery, windy, and cold going up, but we were dressed for it and had a pretty good time. Here's the mandatory McMurdo from Observation Hill picture, click it to view a larger version with labels for buildings that I've mentioned here:

Q:Think an old fart hiker in his mid-40s in good condition has a
reasonable chance of getting hired at McMurdo? I get the impression
that almost everyone down there is under 30.

A:Yep, there are plenty people in their 40s down here. Definitely go to
the job fair in Denver if you're interested in getting a job though,
don't think too many people get hired without going there. Good
luck!

Happy Camper School!

2005-10-16T11:51:00.000+13:00

Well, I survived camping out in a snow cave on an ice shelf in Antarctica (tongue twister there!) Had a really good time, and surprisingly didn't ever get very cold with the exception of fingertips getting chilled when doing things that would have been really tricky with gloves on.

There were 19 students in my group and 2 instructors, Cecilia and Trevor, who are super cool people. After an hour or so in classroom instruction, we put on our cold weather gear and piled into the back of a Delta (giant off-road vehicle - this one has a box on the back for people, some have other tasks like our fuels Delta, Scharen, that has a big tank on the back) to roll over to "snow camp city," which is out on the ice shelf past Scott Base. The ride out was nice, much smoother ride than a Haaglund, and we were at the camp 20-30 minutes later. We got out of the Delta and into a warmed Jamesway (leftover insulated tent/cabin thing from the Korean War) for a little more instruction, then set off to start building our camp!

The first big project was setting up our Scott Tents (pyramidal tent in the picture,) which was pretty easy since there wasn't too much wind and the snow was nice. Next, we piled up all our bags of gear, covered them with tarps, and started shoveling on snow. Once we had 18" or so of snow packed down on the gear, we left the pile and started sawing out blocks of compacted snow to build a wind wall. The wind wall construction was pretty cool, the packed snow was about the consistency of really dense styrofoam so we could do some fairly elaborate masonry work with it. Once the wall was completed, we dug an entrance into the snow cave and started pulling out the gear leaving an igloo shaped structure. Next, we erected several modern 4 season, two person, mountaineering tents behind the snow wall. Ben and I still had some energy left, so we set out to dig a kitchen and dining area, which turned out to be a big hit when the wind started blowing a bit later on.

Eventually, we had a completed camp and started cooking and eating. Fortunately, the instructors didn't have us melt snow to get all of our water, which would have taken quite a while for the size group we had. We ate the usual camping food - freeze dried meals, chocolate bars, granola, nuts, etc. and really enjoyed it after a few hours of hard work moving snow! The instructors went back to stay in the Jamesway and we were all on our own for the night.

One of the nifty things about Antarctica in the summer is that the sun pretty much doesn't set. At this point, it dips behind the horizon a bit around midnight, but it's always plenty bright to do things outside, and usually bright enough to need some dark sunglasses. Our group got done building the camp a little earlier than usual, so we were all a little bored and needed something do do before bed, so we did the logical thing and started cutting out a bunch of blocks of snow and stacking them up! In the end, we had built a rather large throne out of snow overlooking all of snow camp city!

I ended up sleeping with two other people in the snow cave that the happy camper class had built a few days ago - it was a tight squeeze for three people, but we made it work and slept surprisingly comfortably!

The next morning, we broke camp and walked over to the instructor hut to learn some more stuff. Fortunately (for learning's sake,) the wind was blowing pretty hard, which was nice because we were aiming to practice setting up camps in a semi-realistic emergency situation. First we were instructed on the use of the handheld VHF radios and the repeaters in the area, then the old military HF radios that are used for communications from the more remote field camps. Unfortunately, the South Pole radio guys were out for the day, so we weren't able to talk with the Polies, but we did setup the radios outside and called in to Mac Ops (our communications guys here in McMurdo.) After the radio stuff, we divided the group in half and went outside for a couple drills. First we had a drill where we had to boil a liter of water from snow, set up a small snow wall, erect a tent, and setup the HF radio in a hurry. To complicate things, one of us (me!) was quietly told to pretend they were getting hypothermic. Had a good time and the group did a really good job. Next, we were given a scenario where someone had walked out of the tent to use the bathroom and a Condition 1 storm blew in. We were given a rope and had to go rescue the person with buckets on our heads to simulate whiteout conditions and loud wind. We didn't do as well with this drill, long story but basically we blindly started walking into a little maze of vehicles, buildings, and small snow cliffs. Also, the wind was strong enough that it blew a few people's buckets off, making things a bit more interesting!

Eventually, we got done with the happy camper stuff and headed back to Mactown. There was an all hands meeting in the galley, which I had to attend, then I got cleaned up and headed over to the fuelie party at hut ten. Had a really good time at the fuelie party, which lasted until 10 or so, then it was over to Gallaghers (one of the bars here,) for the 70s party for a bit, then finally off to bed. Needless to say, by the time I got back to my dorm, I was really tired and very glad to have a regular bed in a heated building!

Other random stuff - Last Friday the Haaglund that I was riding in during sea ice training the other day is no longer with us. It had been driven over to Scott Base and apparently had an electrical fire (wonder if the scott base hitching post is 240v? :) ) while sitting unoccupied outside and burnt to the ground. Preliminary rumors are that the heavy shop will be able to get it going again, but it's going to take quite a while. Apparently the fire was hot enough to melt out all the glass, so it's going to take a bunch of parts to get it going again. Sounds like my promotion will officially be effective at the beginning of our next pay period in about a week and a half, so that's cool. Molly made it down to Christchurch yesterday, so she's going to orientation today and will hopefully be on the flight down tomorrow!

****Questions****

Q:Is your bed comfee and a bit better than the basic college dorm? In
general - is this completely surreal? -Mom

A:Sortof, no, yes. It's a moderately comfy bed, but it's seen better days. I'm in a 4 bunk room in Building 155, which is pretty convenient since that's the same building where the galley, public Internet terminals, station store, and laundry are. So, basically, I can take care of most of my personal stuff without having to put on insulation and going outside. The room is fairly basic - just a rectangle with some beds, some furniture, a phone, and lots and lots of warm clothes. Fortunately (as the sun doesn't set,) we don't have a window so it's not hard to get to sleep when it's time for that! I currently have two roommates, but at some point we expect the fourth bunk to get filled as well.

Q:DO YOU HAVE JOBS -Anonymous

A:Yes, everyone down here has a job. We actually work pretty hard usually, I've just been 'playing' a lot lately because I've been bouncing around getting trained in on all kind of neat things that we've got down here. The normal work week is 6 days (Sunday off,) 9 working hours a day.

Work day #2

2005-10-13T19:11:00.000+13:00

Another busy day! After our morning meeting where we discussed plans for the day and such, we got started with a transfer to move fuel to the power plant and galley tanks. It's a transfer from one of our bulk tanks (2.2 million gallon capacity,) so we got to go for a nice walk to a pass above town and walk the line all the way from there to the far end of town setting valves and such, which was a nice way to learn where things are in town. Right after we had the transfer setup, I had to split off and go to Piston (Pisten? will check spelling soon) Bully training. Pisten Bully's are nifty tracked vehicles that can have either a passenger compartment or flat bed on the back. The fuels department has one with a passenger compartment that gets used for general stuff moving and especially for rolling up long stretches of flexible hose on occasion. Will post pictures of one soon. Really neat little vehicles; they have some kind of continuously variable transmission, diesel engines, really wide treads, and nice plush interiors with functional heaters! After an hour or two of training it was time for lunch, then off to the fuels barn to help out with prepping a big fuel bladder (want to say 10,000 gallons, but don't remember exactly) that's going to be sent out to a field camp in a few days. Then, it was time to get trained on fuel testing, which was also interesting and I ended up helping out with teaching a little (how to use some of the basic lab equipment properly.) We have a fun little machine that tests the flash point of fuel, will have to get a little video clip of it working posted here somehow. After fuels training, I went for a much more in-depth tour of the barn to learn where all the different types of parts, tools, and fittings were, and then it was time to call it a day. Learned lots of practical stuff today, and actually got to help out with some useful stuff with the power plant transfer and the bladder! Tomorrow, I leave in the morning for 'happy camper school' which is a basic Antarctic survival course where we'll go out on the sea ice and set up a camp, then spend the night in it. Should get back in time on Sunday to go to a big meeting, then off to a fuelie party at "Hut 10," which is basically a little house that people can check out for a day at a time for such events. So, that's probably all that'll get posted here for the next several days as I'll be out and then very busy.

Training day.

2005-10-12T22:02:00.000+13:00

The fuels barn - where I'm working when I'm not in the field

So, it's been another incredibly busy day in Antarctica, this time with pretty much nothing but eating and training. At dinner, I counted up the topics I've learned about, and got to nine. The major ones were light vehicle operations, runway awareness, radio operation, timecard policies, how to open the heloport (morning routine to get their fuel systems going and take samples,) a shop tour, and some other things I don't recall at the moment. Had a good time, learned some cool stuff, and got to see more neat things in Antarctica! It was especially neat to be right beside the helopad when choppers were landing and taking off, I haven't ever been that close to helicopters zooming around so it was fun for me. That's all for now, I'm pretty sleepy and tomorrow's another work day (have to be at the barn and ready to go at 7:30am!)

First full day on the ice!

2005-10-11T22:00:00.000+13:00

Wow, today has been totally amazing!

Last night after I made my post here I was chatting in the hall with Gina (one of the other fuelies) and she told me that there was a rumor that I was going to be promoted from being the Fuels General Assistant to a Fuels Operator. What was apparently happening was that Don, who went down to the ice as a fuelie, had a crane and knew how to drive several bits of heavy machinery. As it turns out, there's a desperate need for heavy vehicle operators, so Don was going to turn into a heavy vehicle operator, which would leave a hole in the fuels crew unless somebody could become a fuels operator. That somebody turned out to be me!

This morning after breakfast, I walked up to the fuels barn for the first time and ended up chatting with Scott about the situation - turns out the rumor was true! The promotion is really good for a couple reasons; the main one being a significant pay raise, but also the added perks of being a fuels operator over a general assistant. I'll be able to get outside more, have a chance at getting rotated down to the South Pole for a bit, get higher priority with room assignments and the like, and did I mention that my pay almost doubled? Quite nice!

So, after a quick visit to the fuels barn, I was off for sea ice training. First we had about an hour of classroom time having the basics of sea ice explained (this page has a written version of what we learned in the course - very neat!,) learning about what kinds of forces cause cracks in the ice, where cracks are most likely and how to spot them, and about the different types of sea ice cracks. After the classroom session was over, we donned our ECW gear and loaded into a Haaglund (the orange vehicle in the picture) to go out to the ice. This was my first time riding in a Haaglund, and it was pretty interesting. The units we have are a bit on the old side, and the heaters are a bit temperamental, so it wasn't heated at all. The ride was a bit bumpy as you'd expect from a tracked vehicle, but it wasn't nearly as bad as some people would have you think.

We stopped about 15-20 minutes out at a patch of bare ice and learned how to anchor a tent when you're out on open ice in case you're out traveling and get caught in a storm. The technique we learned is called a V-Thread anchor (also known as an Abalakov anchor,) where you take an ice screw and drill two holes that meet at the bottom (shaped like a V pointing into the ice) and feed your guyline through the hole to anchor the tent to the ice.

After making a bunch of anchors, we piled back into the Haaglund and went for a bit longer drive out towards the Erebus Ice Tongue. An ice tongue is where a glacier runs off the edge of land and out into the sea, forming a big chunk of ice sticking out into the water. We were heading out towards the ice tongue because among other things, it causes pressure features in the ice, which we were out to learn about. We got to a point where the instructors had planned to close off the road and divert it around some particularly large pressure ridges and 'rounders.' Rounders are comparatively rare and are caused when sea ice is under pressure and flexes downwards, forming shallow rounded troughs. Rounders can actually force the surface of the ice below sea level, so if they develop a hole they will fill up with water, which might or might not freeze.

So, we got out of the haaglund to look at the cracks and place some black wands (bamboo sticks with color coded flags on the end) to mark the road as closed. While we were investigating these cracks someone spotted a penguin in the distance! The penguin saw us as well, and was curious, so he started walking directly towards our group as we took pictures of him. Unfortunately, my memory card was nearly full, so I only got one picture from a distance, but other students got some really good closeups of the penguin (and me with the penguin!) that I'll get copies of and post on here later. As the penguin got closer, we all got down on our knees to be less intimidating and he came even closer! As we the penguin was waddling up and we were watching, a snowmobile came down the road - it turned out to be a nice coincidence that it was one of the main penguin researchers from McMurdo. As we were all talking, the penguin actually walked around and through our group of people, which was a really neat experience.

Eventually, we left to go scout out a new route for the road around the pressure features and find some cracks to investigate. We found some 'working cracks' in the ice and started to profile (measure different properties) them. To look at the cracks, we shoveled out trenches in the snow perpendicularly to the crack to expose the bare ice, then used an ice drill to penetrate the ice sheet down to the liquid water below. Then, we dropped a nifty little tape measure device down the hole to gauge the thickness of the ice. The ice we were measuring was more than 3 meters thick, and we measured the different steps along the working crack to it's thinnest point, where it was still over a meter thick - plenty strong to drive over in most vehicles. Even though we were looking at cracks in the ice, there was no liquid water visible anywhere - when it gets exposed in this kind of weather it doesn't take very long to refreeze, forming a thinner band through the ice sheet.

So, after we had profiled a couple cracks, we set about setting wands along our new section of the road, which was a lot of fun. Three of us walked and ran behind the Haaglund to place the wands - one person would mark where to make the holes, one would drill them, and one would set the wand in the new hole. So, we repeated that process dozens of times and eventually had a new section of road to divert people around the bad ice!

Eventually, we made it back to McMurdo, where I had dinner and then attended a lecture on traveling around outside of the base. There are a few established hike/ski trails around the base here that we can go out on if the conditions are good and if you have attended this lecture. The lecture was pretty much stuff that I already knew about cold weather travel, plus an overview of the trails around here that I had only heard about and seen on a few maps in passing. Good information, and now I can go out hiking (as if I've got any free time :) )!

Once the lecture was over, I went back to my room to find that two roommates arrived on the flight today (which we actually saw landing from several miles out on sea ice,) so we visited for a bit. They both seem like pretty good guys, but they were tired from the trip down so I left and started emailing people and working on this ridiculously long journal post!

2005-10-10T21:58:00.000+13:00

So, it is cold in Antarctica! Made it down safe and sound today from Christchurch, and I got to ride in the cockpit of a C17 on the way! Had a pretty good time, only little teeny bad thing that happened was I forgot to put some spare batteries in my carryon, so I don't have any pics of hopping out of the jet onto the sea ice. Spent a little time unpacking and looking around, ate dinner, then went off for a little walk to get some crispy fresh air and stretch the legs. Will be posting a lot more text and some pictures sometime soonish, but I'm sleepy and need to get up pretty early tomorrow morning. Breakfast, then a day of sea ice training! Can't wait!

To fly? no

2005-10-09T09:46:00.000+13:00

So, the flight was scheduled for this morning so we got up early and went through all the stuff to fly out. Loaded onto the plane, taxied around, and waited... and waited... then the navigator came on and told us that the weather was iffy, so we were going to wait... and wait... Finally the flight was cancelled, so we should be heading down tomorrow if the weather at McMurdo is better. Will post more details later, but there's a long line of people waiting for the computer, so that's all for now!

Bumped!

2005-10-08T11:36:00.000+13:00

Last night I found out that I have been bumped off the flight that I was originally scheduled to leave on today, so it's another day in chch! Not sure whether the plane will be flying on Sunday, so it could be two more days! Unfortunately, the weather outside is really nasty - it's cold and raining. Think it's going to be a day of sitting around reading and such, might go exploring if the weather breaks or whatever. That's all for now, will post more when there's more to post!

Quick update

2005-10-07T15:53:00.000+13:00

Yesterday evening I was goofing around on the computers at the YMCA and ran into my friend Shelton from the AT. Shelton will be a prep cook at McMurdo, and is scheduled to go down to the ice on the same flight that I'm headed down on. Hadn't seen her since somewhere in New Hampshire on the trail in 2003, so that was kind of cool. We visited for a bit, then she headed off to bed to sleep off the long flight over here from LA.

This morning after breakfast (Fruit Delight Muesli - very tasty stuff!) I went for a long walk up to the Antarctic Centre, took care of email, then finally took the Antarctic tour that's advertised all over town. The tour was pretty neat, they had several interesting displays, including one where people go into a room that gets chilled and windy. It's advertised as being an 'Antarctic Storm,' but I have a feeling the real thing is colder and windier, and has a bit less visibility... Had fish and chips for lunch (the little stand on Catherdral Square is better and half as expensive,) then read for a while in my NZ travel guide to get some ideas for things to do after the ice. So many options!

Talking with Liesl (south pole winter station manager, also south pole fuelie and generally cool person) this evening, I found out that the plane that was heading for McMurdo today boomeranged, so those guys should be back in town in the next hour and a half or so. That most likely means that I'll be spending tomorrow in NZ instead of in the back of a C17, so that's neat. The tentative plan is to take a bus over to Littleton and see what it's like over there unless the weather is nasty. Anyways, that's all for now - I'm off to track down Shelton (who should be finishing up with orientation) and grab some dinner!

Finally, some pictures!

2005-10-06T11:49:00.000+13:00

So, as you can see I finally got around to pulling some pictures off the camera and posting them! Fortunately, the nice people at the Travel Services Centre in the Antarctic Centre allow us to hook up digital cameras to their computers, and use the 'net for free! They're not the best pictures, just a random sampling of a few shots that I've taken over the last few days. The top two are pictures from the famous Christchurch botanical gardens, which are really neat. They're beautifully maintained and have a bunch of very interesting plants and animals - I'll try to get some better pictures of them later in my visit.

The second row is a couple pictures of around town. The one on the left is the cathedral in the center of town. Haven't been in it yet, but will probably do that either later this evening or sometime tomorrow. On the right of the second row is a picture of where I'm staying, the YMCA, and off to the right is the botanical gardens. The Y is at a really handy location, it's obviously right beside the gardens, and it's only a short walk from the center of town. Right across the street from the Y (just out of the frame on the right side) is the arts centre, which is a neat collection of little museums, cafes, shops, and the like. Very cool architecture in this part of town.

And finally, on the bottom row we have a duck.

So, in Antarctic news. Not a whole lot to write about at this point, but I'm sure that I'll be learning lots more before the end of the day. The flight that was supposed to leave this morning was cancelled, so there are a bunch of ice people wandering around apparently aimlessly. I won't be too surprised if my flight gets bumped a day farther leaving me with Saturday to goof off as well! I've got an arrangement to meet with several ice people to play Frisbee shortly, so I'm off to go do that. More later!

Chillin' in chch

2005-10-05T16:16:00.000+13:00

Wow that last post sure was a long one!

Yesterday was another day of training stuff, although it was far less comfortable, entertaining, and interesting than Sunday and Monday were with the fuels department. Why the change? Today was 'orientation,' a big meeting of everyone who flew down to the ice this morning... and me!

So why was I the only person in the room not heading to the ice today? It turned out that when I arrived in Christchurch from the states, there were a couple mistakes made. Firstly, someone forgot to send my travel fund to the airport, as I touched on in that last post. Secondly, the packet of information I was given (maps of Christchurch and the Antarctic center, general info, training times, etc.) didn't contain any information on when I was to attend orientation!? Orientation is a fairly generic procedure, so rather than embarking on a (probably massive) paper chase, I just went with the rest of the fuelies (who were leaving today) and all was well. Going a couple days early wasn't a problem at all, and it was neat to meet some more ice people too.

Anyways - orientation wasn't too much fun. We basically had to get up around 6am (well before any coffee shops are open) and drag ourselves up to the Antarctic Centre, which is a bit out of town right near the airport, then listen to the company line for a few hours. First was the director of Raytheon Polar Services telling us we needed to be safer, but not explaining how (because reported injuries had risen over the last season- long rant I'm not going to get into, but the key word there is reported,) then the new HR manager (who has never been to the ice, and has only been with the company for 6 weeks) told us all about herself and how she's going to improve things that haven't even historically been an issue for this group. We also learned plenty about how she guesses her new job will be different from her past experience. So, in short, this was not my cup of tea (although I did consume several of those leading up to lunch.)

After the provided, and pretty tasty, buffet lunch, we got back to the orientation. This session was longer, but I enjoyed and benefited from it quite a bit more than the previous several hours. This session was being delivered by Scott (not to be confused with my boss, Scott,) head of EHS (environmental and health safety I think,) who had some really good points, plenty real world experience, and generally seemed like a cool guy. So we listened to Scott for a while, then took a test at the end before finally getting to leave somewhere around 4pm. This test was an interesting addition to the work-in-Antarctica process, and I think it deserves a paragraph of it's own.

The safety test... Not a terribly interesting set of 50 questions (49 actually, one was a bad question we were instructed to scratch out,) plus some bonus questions including a couple essays, but the implications of this test are something I find interesting. The first thing I found interesting about this little test was that I didn't hear any mention of it until I was already in Christchurch, NZ. Neither had anyone else who wasn't in an administrative position. Not a big deal until you learn that supposedly you won't be able to go to the ice without passing this test. That's not nice, not nice at all. Also interesting is the fact that there's a financial incentive to do well on this test - never heard this called bribing though. The idea is that everyone working for Raytheon Polar takes this test the day before they're scheduled to leave on a plane to McMurdo. If they get less than 80% of the questions right, they don't get to go. If they get more than 80% right, they get issued a 'safety card' and get to board the plane. If they get the highest score (in their group I believe, not positive though) they get a $200USD cash bonus, and there are awards for the first couple runners up as well. This safety card thing is about the only thing Scott (safety Scott) said that I thought was really stupid. We're required to keep this card on us at all times while on the ice, and supposedly we'll be spot checked to make sure that we've got this card on our person while we're working. That sounds like a pain to me, why not just not allow people to go there in the first place if they haven't passed safety training? Why not just keep a list of people who have passed training with the inspector who's doing these spot checks? So, interestingly, someone at the orientation called Scott on this one and asked him those questions. The response to the 'why?' was basically "because I told you so", then it became "because I don't want to carry around a clipboard" when it was pushed a little bit farther. Interesting...

So, today has been a lazy day for me - it's the first of 3 I've got with pay and no work obligations. I slept in, did laundry, read, took a nap, and headed up to the Antarctic Centre (where I am now) to mail a box for my friend Nick, a helo tech, and play on the computers at the Travel Services Center. It's about 5pm now, which means that I'll be leaving shortly to go back down to town for my main motivator - food!

Live, from New Zealand...

2005-10-02T19:03:00.000+13:00

I'm in Christchurch (chch from here,) and have begun training for my job in Antarctica! The trip down went pretty smoothly, and I've really been enjoying being in chch so far. The fuels crew seems like a group of really cool, smart, sane people, so I'm pretty excited about that. I've got nearly $1500NZD in my pocket (travel fund!!) with one more day of training, followed by a day of orientation, then 3 days with no official duties in Christchurch to use it on if I please. Life is good.

So, in a bit more detail.

After making that last post, Molly and I went over to the hardware store and picked up a few random things; a lock for the duffel of gear that I'll be leaving in chch, an inline receptacle (think the jack end of an extension cord,) and I think something else but can't remember what it was at the moment. We then rolled back to her house to finish off a box of ice cream, pack stuff into the van, then head over to the bus stop. At the bus stop we said our goodbyes and all that, I caught the bus and was on the road!

Got the baggage checked with no issues at all, which was a big relief for me since I was checking a boxed bike. I had heard plenty horror stories about people checking bikes and being hit with seemingly random combinations of bike fees, oversize luggage fees, no fees, confusion, etc. This time, it just got an oversized baggage sticker and was loaded through a different conveyor without costing me anything since that's Qutantas' (the international carrier) policy on bikes! I went through security smoothly as well (incidentally, I haven't ever had a real problem with it since 9/11, don't see what the big deal there is) then grabbed a bite to eat and sat down to kill some time at the gate. Within an hour or so, a couple guys showed up and started talking like reunited old friends, and I caught a glimpse of a USAP patch on one guy's pack. So, I introduced myself and found out that I was talking to John Garbe (the friend of my friend Catherine's brother, mentioned previously,) and Doc, who is the fuels mechanic! We chatted for a bit, then more and more ice people started to trickle into the concourse to catch the flight to LAX. We had a good time visiting, then found out our flight out was delayed for 45 minutes, which sounded like a good opportunity for (overpriced airport) ice cream! Caught the flight to LA when it was ready, which went pretty quickly. At LA, we walked over to the international terminal, stopping on the way for (overpriced airport) beers and snacks, then on to wait some more! At the gate for our flight to Auckland, we met some more ice people, then boarded the giant Boeing 747-400 for the big flight!

My first step into the 747 brought back vivid memories of a really long, hot, stuffy flight between New York and Madrid several years ago. It felt like a solid 95 degrees in the plane - I was dreading spending the next 12+ hours sitting in it, but after a quick chat with some other people, it was established that the plane had already started cooling off and they had been assured that within in little while it would be down to comfortable temperatures. The aircrew was correct, and within half an hour of takeoff the plane was comfortable. A while after that it was just cool enough to justify wearing a fleece jacked - my favorite temperature for flying! Listened to music, goofed around with the in-seat entertainment system, talked with my neighbors, ate some decent airline food, and even managed to squeeze in a few hours of restless sleep before touching down in Auckland, New Zealand just before sunrise! I changed out all the US currency in my wallet to get some New Zealand dollars (NZD) and waited in line to get the passport stamped and pick up my checked luggage. The bike box appeared undamaged and my duffel came out unscathed as well, so I got them loaded onto a card and waited in line to go through customs.

Customs, the next step I had worried about, was a breeze as well. Didn't have to unpack and repack the bike after I explained that it was strictly a city road bike and it was run through the Xray machine, and none of my gear was fumigated/dipped after it was inspected and confirmed to be clean. After a nice walk over to the domestic terminal, I rechecked my bags and had to pay a $20NZD fee to get my bike shipped to chch, which wasn't entirely unexpected and I had no problem with after the excellent treatment I had received from Quantas so far. Up until this point, I had been traveling with several other people from the fuels department (fuelies, for short,) but after rushing to board the plane to chch (after being delayed with getting the bike checked and such,) I discovered that I was the only fuelie on the flight!? The plane was definitely headed for chch and I was definitely supposed to be heading for there, so it wasn't that big of a deal, but it was a bit of a surprise.

I arrived at the airport in chch no problem, met with a RPSNZ person, and headed off to the YMCA in a shuttle van. At the Y (where I would be staying for the next few days,) I found out that check-in wasn't until 2pm (this was at about 8am IIRC) so I left my bag and box, then headed out to explore the city and get some food. An hour or so later, I dropped by the Y and found my boss, Scott, getting out of a car and said hi. Apparently, the rest of the fuelies had been scheduled on the next flight and were also a bit surprised to discover that we weren't all on the same plane. Whatever, we all made it in without incident. Went for a short walk in the nearby botanical gardens (think big, really nice city park - will post pics later) and ended up napping in the grass for a couple hours. Walked around town a bit more, then went back to the YMCA again to 'move in.' The room was ready, so I got my stuff moved, unpacked a bit, assembled the bike (University Bikes did an AWESOME job packing it!) then ran into Seth aka 'The Swede,' one of the other fuelies, and we headed over to Bailie's (a local pub) to meet up with any other ice people who might be there. Met up with a couple other fuelies, had a couple beers, then left to find some food! Ended up eating kabobs at a neat little Turkish place, then heading back to the Y to catch some sleep.

This morning was training time! Caught a shuttle to the Antarctic center with a couple other fuelies and met up with the rest of the fuels department there. We all assembled in a conference room at 9:30 and introduced ourselves, then proceeded to talk fuels stuff for a bit. At 10:30, it was time to go get fitted with our Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear, so we all went over to the Clothing Distribution Center (CDC.) At the CDC, I met with another RPSNZ person, who handed me an envelope with my name on the outside and a bunch of $50NZD bills on the inside - my travel fund that somebody forgot to put in with the material that I was given on arrival in chch yesterday. Yay! Since I hadn't been to the ice before, I had to watch a 10 minute video on Antarctic weather, cold weather clothing stuff, and the fitting process, then I joined the other guys who were trying on all the clothes in our two orange duffels. Unfortunately, my orange duffels weren't there, so I had to talk to a few people and figure out what was going on. Due to some weird paperwork stuff, my bags hadn't been assembled yet, so I got that taken care of and started playing dress-up! Got all the clothing figured out, had a quick lunch with John, then back to the conference room for more training stuff. The rest of our meeting went well as the first hour had. Everyone was really friendly, all the stuff said made sense, there were plenty jokes and ice stories to go around, and I learned a lot of stuff about what I'm going to be doing. A little after 3pm, we had covered all the material for today, so we were done with training for the day and let go.

I took my bike over to the CDC and tagged it so it could stay there while I'm on the ice. The CDC will hold stuff for people working on the ice while they're down there, so I brought some stuff to use for adventuring in New Zealand afterwards with the intent of leaving it there rather than taking a bike and stuff to the Ice and back. After signing the bike in, I walked back to town (probably 3 miles away) with another fuelie (can't remember his name - I'm really bad with those,) got back to the Y, organized some stuff, then went looking for a fish and chips place for some food. Before finding a fish and chips place, I ran into this neat looking Internet cafe, so here I am an hour later finishing up a post on the last few days. Going to head over to Baileys since it's right around the corner and see if there are any other ice people there, then see what happens!

**pictures and spellcheck will come later, need to get going now and don't have my camera's USB cable handy...***

Leavin' on a jet plane... or 3

2005-09-30T04:08:00.000+12:00

So, since the last post... Molly, Ed, and I spent Wednesday morning hanging out at Ed's place talking bikes and drinking coffee - had a really nice morning. Molly and I drove down to the bike shop in Boulder and dropped off my bike to get it boxed, then went over to the Boulder Book Store to check out travel books and get a copy of the Rough Guide to New Zealand. We browsed as long as our stomachs would allow, then went to get some food. Next, I helped Molly out with getting more of her stuff packed into the attic, then we got set and went for dinner with my friend Mags and Molly's friend Susan, picking up the boxed bike on the way. We ate a ton of excellent food, which is to be expected at Sherpas, then walked the Pearl Street Mall about 4-5 times to help digest a little. Nice evening! This morning while I was getting some breakfast, Molly got a call informing her that she's PQed and will be going down to The Ice as a cargo handler in a couple weeks! Yay! So, that's about all for now, I've just printed out a hard copy of my itinerary and am about to go pick up a couple items at the hardware store before going to the airport. Next post should be from the other hemisphere!

Quick note from Longmont

2005-09-29T01:11:00.000+12:00

The bags are packed! Finished up (hopefully) with packing everything but the bike last night, so that's cool. Meeting Molly this morning to get a ride over to our friend Ed's house, then we'll head back to Boulder from there. Next I'll drop off the bike, pick up a New Zealand travel guide and a book for the flight, go get some lunch, take care of other stuff that comes up, and have dinner at Sherpas with some friends. At least that's the current plan, we'll see how it goes!

Getting the bags packed

2005-09-27T17:30:00.000+12:00

So, for about a week now I've been in Colorado bouncing back and forth between my uncle's house in Longmont (where most of my stuff is,) and friend's houses in Boulder (where the shops I need to deal with are.) Nearly everything on the checklist has been taken care of at this point, so it's just a matter of dealing with the small stuff and any additional stuff that pops up between here and takeoff Thursday evening local time.

Got the bike touring stuff tested out and with a few little adjustments, I think things will roll quite nicely. At some point, I'll try to do up a gear review of the stuff I'm taking for bike touring since I haven't seen too many good ones out there for the kind of thing that I'm hoping to do. Am planning on having the guys over at University Bicycles box up my bike Wednesday and check it as my second checked bag on the flight to NZ. The bike and associated gear stuff will be left at at the RPSC offices in Christchurch while I'm working on the ice, then I'll pick it up when I'm done working and go goof off in New Zealand for a month or two before returning to CO.

John, my friend of my friend's sibling who's also going to the ice, sent some interesting info that I'm going to repost here so that other people might find it useful:

The luggage weight restriction info in the participant guide isn't the
greatest, so I'll give you a little more information about it. On the
flight from Cheech to McMurdo there is a 50 pound weight limit on
checked luggage. You get loads of clothing (about 50lbs) at the
clothing distribution center (CDC) in cheech, half of which you'll wear
on the flight and half will go in your luggage. You will have a
carry-on on the plane (the same size as a commercial airline carry-on)
which has no weight restriction. Also, if you have a laptop you can
bring a laptop bag on board in addition to the carry on. So, if you are
close to the checked baggage weight limit, you put some heavy stuff in
your carry-on or stuff it in the many pockets of the large parka you'll
be wearing. If you hit the weight limit on checked luggage and still
have more stuff, you put it in a box and leave it at the CDC and it will
get flown down at a later date (usually 3-5 weeks later). So, you can
really bring down as much stuff as you want, don't let the 50lb limit
scare you.
Here's my take on boots to add to what Scott had to say. I found that
in McMurdo its nice to have three types of boots. A pair for really
cold weather at the beginning of the season, which they give you at the
CDC, a pair of insulated work boots for November and February, and a
pair of uninsulated boots for December and January. I and the other new
fuelies last year had bought rather warm boots, and our feet were
sweating like crazy in the middle of summer. However, I had no problem
finding uninsulated work boots in the well stocked lost-and-found, aka
'skua'.
Oh, and you're the GA, so you'll be spending a lot of time in the fuels
lab testing the fuel. Since there are fuel vapors in the lab you can't
plug in stereos or radios, but there is a radio and cassette player in
there that runs on rechargeable batteries. The selection of tapes is
minimal, so you might think about bringing along a few tapes to listen
too. Your mp3 player would probably do the job too, but last year's GA
never had headphones on, I'm not sure why.
Changing your tickets for traveling afterwards is real easy. They hand
out information about it in January. If you don't want to fly straight
home you visit Raytheon's travel agency in Christchurch in February and
change your ticket to whatever you want. There are three basic ways of
changing your ticket: you can delay your flight straight home as long
as you want, you can delay your flight home and arrange for stops at
places on the way home for a minimal cost (last years options were
Auckland, Honolulu, and LA, but some years there are more exotic
options), or you can take the cash value of your return flight, usually
around $1000, and use it toward whatever flight plan you want, such as
flying to Asia, an around the world ticket, etc., and you pay the extra
cost.
Also, you can leave stuff (cloths, tents, bikes) at the CDC while you're
in McMurdo, which is real handy.
Hopefully you'll find some of this info helpful. I think the
information they supply to new employees is a bit weak, so I thought I'd
pass on some stuff that's helpful to know before you leave home. Have
fun packing!

-John

So, that's all for now. The next few days leading up to takeoff are likely to be busy and chaotic, so there's a good chance this will be the last post from Colorado! Will be taking pictures and posting them sometime in the near future, so keep hitting that refresh button!