Sunday, January 6, 2008

sitrep 5/1/08

Sitrep 5th January 2008

Weather summary: Light south east winds around 15 knots in the morning dropping to the occasional 5 knot puff in the afternoon. There was about 7 oktas of cloud cover most of the day.

Today's Activities

With the new landing and stair case in, Jon and I finished the timber balustrade up the stairs, creating a seamless railing from the base of the stairs and along to the new front door. The hut looks quite homely from a distance now with a bit of heritage feel to it. We both were happy to be playing with timber for once (being chippys) instead of foam panels and aluminium!

Steve and Jon also fitted the spare base station antennae to the hut so that we can run the second Iridium phone on, in the hope that we can curb our habit of missing every incoming call so far. Steve also made more adjustments to the solar power system to supply a continual power feed to the base camp radio.

Anne, Michelle and Tony spent the day in Mawson's Hut continuing with the snow excavation. They uncovered a box that is believed to have the remains of the husky that was found on the ice plateau in the late 90's. Michelle inventoried the contents of Hurley's dark room, and carried out timber moisture reading in numerous sites around the hut. Anne excavated more snow from the top shelf of the south wall at the west end.

Mid afternoon the wind was down; with some stronger wind forecast for the next few days we decided to initiate the deployment of the tide gauge for the French/Australian sea level survey. The zodiac boat was inflated and tethered to the shore for a reconnaissance journey to find a suitable location to place the gauge. Conditions were fine except for a swell that has been running for over a week now, making it challenging to hold position. After a suitable spot was found we returned to shore, bolted in the reference benchmark, before everyone adjourned to Sorensen Hut for the evening meal. With the weather holding and our tummies full of warm lasagne, we headed back over to Boat Harbour to deploy the gauge and shoot a level reference height on the new benchmark.

Jon and Steve headed out in the inflatable zodiac with the heavy tide gauge in tow. Attached to the gauge was a long pole with measuring increments that was to protrude above the water surface that I was to read a height from using a telescopic level. Gaining accurate readings proved extremely difficult in the surging swell, moreover, the tiny numbers on the height staff required far more magnification than the average human eye can achieve. Holding the staff in a perfectly vertical position was the main problem as it was seven meters long and any movement away from plumb resulted in a variant in the measurement. We did our utmost to record the shortest measurement which should equate to the most vertical position. The last hurdle was removing the pole which was actually three poles screwed together, upon rotating it out of its socket the lowest two meter length remained attached to the gauge on the sea floor. When the French dive team visit in the coming weeks they will need to retrieve the final piece of the staff.

The team arrived back at the hut at 1.30 am thoroughly exhausted, the zodiac was lashed down and we retired to the mess.

Tomorrow which is really today, we will be sleeping in and recharging the batteries. There is a small chance that the tourist vessel Orion could arrive but we have not had any emails with them for the last two days.

Warm wishes from the MHF team

Peter McCabe Field Leader

1 comment:

Jane said...

Page 3 Saturday January 5 2008, I saw an article in The Age entitled 'Bullied, mateless - life's tough when your a beige penguin' about your leucistic Adelie penguin. Your team of 'Australian researchers restoring the historic Mawson's Huts at Cape Denison' got a mention too. Well done.
Jane