sitrep 4/1/08

Sitrep 4th January 2008

Weather summary: A bright and sunny day at Cape Denison, that started with plenty of wind. It blew 50 knots most of the night, and maintained around a 30 southerly until early afternoon.

Today's activities.

After the mammoth twelve hour day yesterday, today had a distinct low key feel to it. Jon finished of the interior of the bedroom. It was quite a hive of activity in there as Steve was also fitting the lighting. There are a few nally bins of tools in there at the moment, but once they are removed a few campers will start moving in from the tents. The plan is to have all the tents packed up before the tenth, and everyone living in the hut or the apple. Recent correspondence with the French have them picking up the bulk of our gear between January 10th - 15th, then returning from the Mertz glacier, around the 18th to pick us up with any other gear.

I started to cut the handrail for the new staircase, and began carving the new 'Sørensen Hut' sign.

Anne and Michelle continued excavation work in Mawson's Hut, Michelle is also setting up the monitoring system which will record data for the next year.

Brett chatted to Dave Killick from the Mercury about the "white" leucistic penguin that he found. Leucistic describes animal that have very low levels of melanin in their system as opposed to an albino which has know melanin. There should be an article in print soon.

Peter Morse continued to process his 360 degree recordings. Meanwhile Tony gathered some high resolution photographs to send back over the iridium network, before cooking a lavish spread of Miso Shiro soup, cheese and sundried tomato bread, with a main of fried rice, yep life's tough but someone's got to eat it!

Tomorrow we will look at continuing the guy rope tie downs on the extension, and if the weather is calm we may pool all resources into deploying the tide gauge in Boat Harbour for the French / Australian tide gauge survey.

Warm wishes from the MHF team

Peter McCabe Field Leader