- Monday, 6 March 1995
-
The weather got pretty fierce today. It warmed up to
+08°F (-13°C), but the winds are a pretty steady 45 knots.
It's been snowing for the past day; enough so, that up at
B-133,
we got to leave early because the wind and snow reduced visibility
to 100 feet or less. I was surprised to find that it was
8 degrees out... personally, I thought it felt pretty warm outside.
- Tuesday, 7 March 1995
-
It's not any colder, but it is windier and the visibility is poorer;
perhaps we won't have to work this afternoon. I think if the people
in Weather worked this far up the hill, we'd see Condition 1 declared
for this area more often.
- Wednesday, 8 March 1995
-
It cleared up a bit, so we did have to work the entire day yesterday; I
actually got a lot accomplished, including designing labels for the new
boot disks. After dinner, I met Mark at the Band Room and we jammed for
an hour or so, and then Yvonne dropped by and we jammed a little more. It
was the first time I've played bass while someone else played lead. I'd
only ever played along to recorded music before.
- Thursday, 9 March 1995
-
It's been a fairly quiet morning. It was a nice contrast to all of the
printer and computer moving of yesterday. I will be glad when all of the
computers are in their nice, new winter homes.
- Friday, 10 March 1995
-
The walk up the hill to
B-133
was pretty brutal this morning. When it's -08°F (-22°C)
with 20 knot winds, it's not a good day to forget to wear your
thermals; I think I'll correct the deficiency at lunchtime. In the
meantime, no new work has been dropped on me as of yet, so I
can whittle away at the pile of stuff that I've already got. If I'm
lucky, I can keep up with all of the repair orders while I'm moving
stuff and with the movement orders while I'm repairing stuff.
- Saturday, 11 March 1995
-
Today isn't any warmer, but at least the clouds have let up and it's a
nice, sunny day. After lunch, the entire base is going out "daisy
picking." This practice has nothing to do with flowers, as there
are no plants here. We will be out collecting litter and tying down
items which might blow away in the winter winds. It's an important job;
I've seen the side of dorm 207 where the 4'x8' sheet of plywood penetrated
the 1st floor lounge a few years ago. Better the lounge than one of us!
Tonight is the Outrageous Hat party at Scott Base; I'll be wearing my
Mongolian felt hat. It should be a great time; there are only 10 members
of the New Zealand Antarctic Program wintering-over, so it's always a
wild time when the Americans come to visit.
- Monday, 13 March 1995
-
The Outrageous Hat party was great. The party started slow, but picked up
by 21:00. I got a chance to get to meet several of the Scott Base
winter-overs, including Sean, the science tech. It'll be a lot of fun,
visiting on Thursday nights.
The Sunday afternoon trip to the iceberg was cancelled due to
Condition 2,
so I spent the day playing Civilization and responding to e-mail. After
dinner, I went over to Weather with Jeff Frontz and we got the Terascan
antenna back up after a brief outage induced by a slipped antenna
elevation drive belt. Since we were up on the roof anyway, we took a
moment to watch a pink sunset behind the Transantarctic mountains.
- Tuesday, 14 March 1995
-
I never realized how stiff 10Base-T cables get after a couple of minutes
outdoors at -20°F (-29°C)!
- Wednesday, 15 March 1995, the Ides of March
-
Tonight was the first night I did the greenhouse solo. I've been helping
Jeff Frontz since I got here, but now that the winter tasking has
stabilized, I found a night I can do on my own every week. The routine
maintenance that the other volunteers and myself do includes topping off
the water level in the hydroponic systems; checking the pH, temperature
and nutrient concentrations; adding any needed acid, base or nutrient
solution; and making sure that the support systems (pumps, circuit
breakers, heater) are all operational. I'm really looking forward to
working in the greenhouse after the final sunset in April; as it is,
there were fewer than 14 hours of daylight today. A week from now, on
our autumnal equinox, we'll have 12 hours, like the rest of the world;
it's just that due to our extreme southern latitude, the rate of change
is much higher here than it is at home. At McMurdo
(77°50'S, 166°44'E) the transition from 24 hour light to 24
hour dark (and back again, in the Spring) takes approximately 60 days.
- Thursday, 16 March 1995
-
I made it over to Scott Base tonight after dinner. Woody Porter (who
works at Crary Lab) brought his UNO deck with him, so we had a good time
teaching our hosts how to play. We had more people playing than we
played games, but it was good fun all around, even though not everyone had
a chance to win.
- Friday, 17 March 1995, St. Patrick's Day
-
There are two St. Patrick's Day parties this weekend, one tonight
at Scott Base, and the other tomorrow night, at the Erebus Club at McMurdo.
- Sunday, 19 March 1995
-
What a weekend! The party at Scott Base was a great time. The full moon
rising over Willy Field was an amazing sight; the sky was lavender near
the ground, blending to soft pink higher up. Mt. Erebus and Mt Terror
were bathed in pink light from the setting sun. It was a small crowd
of 20-30 people, mostly listening to music, talking and drinking Guinness
Stout from tall cans (pressurized with nitrogen, for a thick, creamy
head). I had quite a good chat comparing the geography and population
distribution of New Zealand and Ohio. There was green beer, of course,
as well as green gin & tonics. Bruce, the Blarny Gnome was set up in the
corner. Bruce sits on a plank, mounted on top of a weightlifting rack;
there is a hole cut in the wood, exposing Bruce's underside to the world.
Much like the Blarney Stone in Ireland, you hang backwards (holding onto
a chin-up bar) and give him a kiss. Afterwards, you sign the board next
to the names of the other Blarney Gnome kissers. Unlike the Blarney
Stone, kissing Bruce confers no discernable beneficial effects.
When the crowd thinned out a bit, a group of four of us opened up the
dart board and played a bit of 301. When we had gotten down to
three players shooting for a double one and one shooting for a double
two, we decided to throw for double bull. Many rounds later, we decided
to throw one dart, closest to bull wins.
Scotty (of Scott Base) threw a double bull.
After a snack of freshly made, green-tinted meat pastries, we piled into
the last shuttle of the night and headed for home.
We got to take part of Saturday afternoon off to attend a safety lecture,
mostly on weather conditions and check-out procedure. Joe Spain, our Navy
weather forcaster, handed out some excellent pamphlets with the
essentials of how to tell Condition 1 from Condition 2 and 3. Primarily,
Condition 1 is when the visibility falls below 100' or the wind chill
falls below -100°F (-73°C). I crashed out after dinner for a
while, so when I got to the Erebus Club for the McMurdo St Patrick's Day
party, the free beer was long gone and the crowd wasn't too thick. I
stayed for a beer or two, talked with people a bit and then took off. It
was pretty dark and smoky, so I didn't want to stay too long.
The weather was good enough to tour the iceberg, a balmy
-10°F (-23°C) with light, but steady winds. Most of the people
who signed up didn't show, so we had two Häglunds with only three
bodies each. The drive past Scott Base, over the transition and across
the ice shelf was bumpy but uneventful. The iceberg itself
is about 100' tall and a quarter-mile on each side (30m x 400m x 400m). It
floated toward the permanent ice a couple of years ago and became
"landlocked" by the annual ice. On our walk around it, we
passed one seal laying out on the ice and one seal surfacing through a
tiny air hole to occasionally take a breath. Neither one was close enough
to get a very good picture of without a telephoto lens. After another
bumpy but uneventful trip across the ice shelf, we came back to McMurdo in
plenty of time for dinner.
- Monday, 20 March 1995
-
We left Daylight Savings Time and changed over to N.Z. Standard Time this
weekend. Now, when it's the start of the day here, it's the end of the
day on the East Coast of the U.S.
There was a double-feature tonight in the 206 lounge:
"The
Thing" (1951) and
"The
Thing" (1982). It was a small, but appreciative crowd.
We took delight in both pointing out flaws as well as pointing out objects
common to the movies and to our experiences down here. If a field camp of
10 people gets a flame thrower, we all wanted to know why we
didn't get one.
- Wednesday, 22 March 1995, The Vernal Equinox
-
On this, the official start of Autumn, we were greeted by -26°F
(-32°C) ambient temperatures with steady winds of over 20 knots. The
combination was enough to bring the wind chill down to -75°F
(-60°C), our record for the season. Other than that, it turned into
a nice, sunny day.
- Friday, 24 March 1995
-
When I got in this morning, I got the word that I had a chance to go out
and help flag the route to the iceberg. I scooted on over to the BFC and
a handful of us piled in to one of the Häglunds (002, the same one I
was in on Sunday) and we headed out of town. After a quick detour over
to Silver City to drop off some sleeping bags, we got about half way to
the iceberg and three of us jumped out and followed behind the vehicle,
one as a spotter and two setters. The vehicle drove down the road with
one person flinging flagged bamboo poles out every so often and the two
setters would follow along and drill holes in the snow with ice drills (a
brace with a 1.2m stainless steel bit). The spotter hung back a few flags
to make sure we kept the line straight. We only actually walked a mile
or so, but all wrapped up in our ECW, it's harder than it sounds.
Once we got near the iceberg, we marked the break between the sea ice
and the permanent ice with black flags, and then walked around the
iceberg, planting more black flags at exceptionally thin spots in the ice.
We returned home just in time for lunch.
- Sunday, 26 March 1995
-
It was a beautiful day for the "equipment rodeo". There was heavy
equipment set up at three spots this afternoon: the old wood pile site,
the snow dump and the ice shelf just past the Willy field transition. I
walked to the wood pile site with Andrew Crowley. Between the two of us,
we managed to drive everything there.
He moved a milvan and pushed some snow around with the front-end loader.
I managed to move a little dirt with the Caterpillar "D9"
bulldozer, drive "the blade" (an articulated grader) to the
ballpark
and back, and take the fire truck on a spin through town. Most of the
afternoon was gone at this point, so I made it down to the ice shelf and
tooled around on a
spryte
and a Caterpillar "Challenger" bulldozer. When I got back from
my last ride, it was time to go home. I didn't get a chance to drive the
nodwell
which resembles an overgrown spryte
Last modified:
06 June 2001
