Pete's Diary -

I can't believe that it's the 21st already. Where has the year gone? Philip is now 3.5 weeks old. I still haven't seen any more up to date photos, so I can't show them to you.

We have not been back to station since last I wrote. It's been over two weeks since my last shower. We had a swim yesterday to make up for it. The water was a balmy -1°C, and the air temperature a searing 0.1°C. Wind speed only about 5 knots, so the ideal day for a dip. Judy must have stayed in the longest at about 40 seconds. I took 2 quick swims - the second was necessary as there was no photographic evidence of the first. It was nice to get wet and a little bit cleaner.

Today is washing day for me - undies, socks, thermals and a few shirts only. It's nice and sunny with a gentle breeze (about 25 knots according to the weather people), so I thought everything would dry nicely. I went outside to check on the state of drying just now, and the shirts are frozen stiff! Ah well. I will finish drying them over the heater tonight if they don't freeze dry or blow into the sea.

I've been putting this off for as long as possible, but I really should tell you what an electronics engineer does on an island off the coast of Mawson Station/Antarctica. The main work is maintenance and modification of monitoring equipment for the penguin program. This means going out when things get broken and fixing them, or making changes or installing new equipment as the needs change. There is also new equipment that needs to be designed on the spur of the moment. A case in point, and I am very proud of this one. About a week before getting on the boat to come down here, I discovered that I would be included in the roster to stay up all night looking for returning penguins with trackers and depth recorders on them. I simultaneously discovered that there are portable receivers for receiving data from said receivers. With a nod from the boss (the germ of the idea was his), some bribes around the division, and the outlay of some cash, we bought one of these receivers (actually stole one from another department, and bought them another) and threw it and a handful of useful looking components into my tool box.

Down here, with a little bit of time, I put together a little micro based (PIC16F877 processor) interpreter that listens to the receiver, and compares incoming codes to a list in EEPROM. If there is a match and the alarm flag for that code is set, then a natty little buzzer sounds. The person on watch gets woken up, plugs the PC into the little box, and can see which bird or birds have set the thing off. When the sea ice was in, the range seemed to be many km. Now that it is ocean to our door, the birds do not usually set the alarm off until they pop out of the water on Beche or one of the nearby islands to preen themselves. This usually gives us about an hours notice that the bird is coming home.

We've had a few stormy days. This is the view from my hut on such a day.

Also an unusual visitor. There aren't usually any Emperors on the island. This guy had come on shore to moult. He walked right past my hut, and up into one of the Adelie colonies. Goodness only knows why he would choose to go into one of the colonies. He towers over his cousins.

We have spent a few days walking around the island picking up rubbish. It is amazing what gets blown out here from station. We have found many 44 gallon drums, and managed to get a few back to camp, cut the tops off them, and fill them up with bits of flotsam that we have found.

On one of our trips we found some Snow Petrel and Storm Petrel chicks. They are tiny, and so cute. This is a picture of a snow petrel chick. He was about as big as a small fist. The storm petrel chick was much smaller. I didn't get a good picture of him.

Penguin Pete's Diary

21/1/01 - Bechervaise Island (still)