Penguin Pete's Diary
| Peter's home page |
19/12/00 - Bechervaise Island
Bechervaise Island - near the "googies" (lab and living huts). Photo courtesy Kym NewberyI should have written more before now, but I have been flat out, in the field every day. It is very tiring as you can imagine, but the weather has been kind. Average temp about 0°C, ave wind speed about 5 knots, and sunny or light cloud every day. That was until yesterday. Let me tell you a little story.....
Bechervaise Island is just a few km out from Mawson station. Up until last week we were able to ride the quads out here, and off to the other islands to do our work. The sea ice is getting thinner now and is quite variable, so we are now no longer able to 'quad' out. We must walk or ski.
The skiing and walking was OK up until yesterday when we had to go out to do some field work on Verner and Welsh Islands. We left Bechervaise Is. on skis, but only got about 500m before we decided that walking would be faster, and abandoned the skis. The wind was really blowing up by the time we got to Verner. Andy and I stayed on Verner to do some work on the instrumentation there. I had upgraded some of the equipment in my first week here, and needed to finish doing the communications equipment. Judy and Meg continued on to Welsh. The wind was so strong, and the ice around the island so broken up that it took us more than an hour just to get the toolboxes and packs to the instrument site. And of course the radio transmitter is up on top of the hill, the most windy site of all. The job took about 4 hours when I thought it would only take 2.
After packing up we headed over to Welsh. It took about an hour to walk over there, and the wind was picking up (and picking us up) nicely. When we got there, the ice we had been using as our aproach had broken up. We could see the others packs, but had no idea how they had got there. It took us nearly an hour and a half just to find solid enough ice to get us onto Welsh. Andy and I then helped the others finish the census work (looking for tagged birds again - this time the females). We finished this at about 8:30pm, and made our way - labouriously and with much falling over as the wind was really strong now - down to the sea ice, where we were blown all over the place. We nearly decided not to try to get home, and to bivy out at the island (we always carry bivy and sleeping bags), but after stashing some more gear in some cracks in the rocks, fitting our crampons and leaning hard into the wind, we made progress to Verner, and then to Bechervaise. The weather people tell us that the wind was between 50 and 80 knotts (about 80 to 100 km/h), and on the sea ice there is no shelter. It is about a 5 km walk, and took us over 3 hours. Probably my most intrepid day yet.
Today lassitude set in. The wind is still blowing a gale, and is set to continue until tomorrow, and the temperature outside is about -5 or so.
