Christmas and Goodbyes - Monday to Sunday - 20 December to 26 December

This has been a week of contrasts, saying goodbye to Jeroen, Katrine and Lourens who are heading back to Tristan on the Edinburgh, and for Jeroen, the long trip back to New Zealand via Cape Town.

Leaving the island on the "Fifty Pence piece", the M.V. Edinburgh in the background

Once the Edinburgh has left we are marooned on Gough until she returns in early February. It was sad to say goodbye to Lourens and Katrine, who had been really nice to the lonely, bored South African on Tristan, but they have work to complete.

Skua

This week has been enjoyable otherwise, on Wednesday myself, Ross and Michelle hiked over to the Giant Petrel to put marker rings on the legs of the chicks. The colony is on the Western side of the island, about 8km from the base. To get there you have to hike up from the base towards South Peak and across Gonydale, a high altitude (for Gough) wetland where the Tristan Albatross breed.

Tristan Albatross

Once we had crossed Gonydale and had moved over Cooper's Col to the Western side of the island, the weather became terrible. The wind picked up and was blowing so hard that at times it was difficult to walk and the clouds dropped lower until we were walking in a complete whiteout. Fortunately we quickly traversed around West Rowett peak and dropped down to the Giant Petrel colony.

The Giant Petrel colony with Saddle Island in the background

We quickly put up the tents and then went over to the colony to start ringing chicks. I must say that Petrels are not my favorite birds, they are ungainly and ugly. I now have even more reason to dislike them. When the chicks  feel threatened, as they do when you approach to grab them before attaching the tag, they spit a mixture of fish oil and vomit all over you. It stinks to high heaven and is extremely nauseating. To make matters worse it began to pour with rain. There is nothing quite like crawling around on your hands and knees in bird vomit to make your day. We tagged the first half of the colony (about 80 chicks) and then went to bed.  We discovered that the tent leaked right over my bed and had to jury rig a survival bag and a jacket to keep me more or less dry for the night. Not the best night of my life for sure!

Wind driven rain

The following morning the rain stopped and we were able to tag the rest of the chicks and start the long walk home.

There are two rivers on the Western approach to the base that can become impassable after heavy rain but fortunately we where able to cross with only some wet feet. It was three very bedraggled and smelly people who arrived back at the base in desperate need of a hot shower and hot meal.

And then it was Christmas...

First week on Gough - Wednesday to Sunday - 15 December to 19 December

Church Rock, on the Northeastern coast of Gough

Good news, I have finally made it to Gough after nearly a month in transit. It is a real relief to be here and finally have something to do after spending weeks sitting around with no real purpose. I really don't handle boredom well!

All the way to Gough the sea was quite rough and stormy making me worried that we wouldn't be able to land, but when we came around the Southeastern side of the island it calmed totally. Getting on to the island is normally by helicopter from the SA Agulhas but the Edinburgh is a fishing vessel so no helicopter. We were lowered over the side in a small fiber glass dinghy and motored over to the cliff at Crane Point where we climbed aboard the "Fifty Pence piece", a flat platform about 1.5m in diameter with rope rigging around the sides. We were then hoisted up the cliff by a crane. It was quite fun, if you don't mind heights.

The rest of Wednesday and most of Thursday were spent unpacking and learning from Jerone (the guy I'm replacing) how to calibrate and download GeoLocator Systems (GLS), used to track birds and Dive Depth Loggers (DDL), used to measure penguin dive habits.

Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross with Chick

For the rest of the week we have been counting Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross nest occupancy and contents which involves walking through some of the worst terrain I have ever hiked in. The braken covers everything and is headheight in places and the ground is full of burrowing bird nests which you fall into constantly.

Ross Cowlin, the other RSPB researcher on the island is about my age and (insert chorus of "It's a small world after all) is from Cape Town and used to date Bridget Maasch, a friend of a friend of mine, Kate Larmuth. Weird huh?

Ross, waiting for penguins to return

We have also been tagging Northern Rockhopperpenguins with DDL's, which is a rather tedious process. Fifteen DDL's were attached to adult penguins at the beginning of the month and we have to recover them as the birds come in to feed their chicks. Trying to pick out which bird is which is really difficult even after we have marked their beaks with Tippex and spray painted their chest's after tagging them. We also have to take a bunch of physical measurements, six feathers, 1ml of blood and induce vomiting by filling their stomachs with water and then holding them inverted over a bucket to collect the stomach contents. We are going out there tonight to see if we have better luck in the evening and night than the previous two days daytime shifts. We have recovered only four of the fifteen deployed loggers (which cost $600 each) and we need at least thirty DDL measurements per month for this study...

Northern Rockhopper penguin

The penguin colony is in the middle of Seal Beach, about half a km from the base, the seals are quite aggressive and territorial, they only move because we are bigger than they are. At night with headlamps they wont be able to see how big we are and will only move reluctantly. Tonight is going to be interesting.

Dry land – Tristan da Cunha – Thursday to Tuesday – 2 December to 14 December

The island was visible from the bridge of the Baltic from about 8am this morning, and what a sight it was, even half hidden by cloud it is impressive with massive cliffs that plunge hundreds of metres straight into the sea. Fortunately the swell has remained small and the harbour is workable and we were able to go ashore.

Tristan da Cunha from the Baltic. Edinburgh is on the flat plain just visible over the bridge wing

I’m staying in a self-catering cottage, run by a woman called Vera Glass (one of only seven surnames on the island – things are a little “agricultural” around here…) which is nice, the décor is interesting too, I even have a Barbie Doll toilet roll holder . I’ll be here for the next week or so, until the Edinburgh (a fishing vessel that fishes around Gough) arrives to take me down to Gough. The town of Edinburgh (the only town on the island) is nice, and very English, but with some things to remind me of home. All the food, groceries, cars, equipment, basically everything that they don’t make or grow here comes from good old SA, so you can buy Chomps and drink SAB beer in “the local” (actually the Albatross bar, but no one calls it that). I was hoping for a traditional English pub, with a name like the Shepard and Leg or something, but was sadly disappointed. It doesn’t serve food or even have wood panelling. Could be anywhere really.

Barbie, the legless toilet roll warmer

I have been surprised by the number of vehicles and the amount that people drive around the town. Seems as if every family has at one car and everyone drives everywhere, in a town that you can almost spit across. Only the ex-pats on the island walk, weird huh? The furthest it is possible to travel on the island is to the potato patches about 3km from the village, and there is a bus service that runs regularly. I can’t understand it, especially when petrol and diesel cost £1.50/L.

Saturday was sheep shearing day, a huge event on the island. For the preceding week the islanders have been gathering their sheep from the plateau around the village and moving them to a large sheep pen near the potato patches. Once all the sheep are gathered in the large pen the island children are responsible for finding their parents sheep by using the notches in the sheep’s ears as identification. Once each sheep is caught, it is moved into a smaller pen where it is wrestled to the ground and pinned down so that it can be sheared. They start really early in the morning, around 4 am, so by 10 am they have finished and the drinking can begin. The rest of the day passed in a blur…

Finally, the Edinburgh has arrived on time and the sea is calm. The next update will hopefully be from Gough on Wednesday evening or Thursday.

St. Mary's Church, the Catholic church on the island

The reason that the island's harbour can only be used in millpond conditions. The swell was only 3-4ft when this was taken...

Cape Town to Tristan da Cunha – Sunday to Wednesday (November 28 – December 1)

The weather has improved and the swell has dropped, thankfully! It has given me some time to do some exploring of the Baltic. This is not a ship full of opportunities to occupy the mind, boredom is a problem… But there are two gorgeous Border Collie pups, Skye and Tom, in the forward hold who need regular exercise and love which gives me something to do for a couple of hours each day. Most days revolve around waiting for meals (which the cook prepares somehow in kitchen that is rolling around), chatting to the other passengers, who are an interesting bunch to say the least, watching movies, reading and playing games. Thank you, Kobus, this is a freaking awesome laptop!

The view from my cabin

My cabin, my bunk was on the top right

The passengers and crew:

The passengers are an eclectic bunch: Anna, a PhD geology student from the University of East Anglia who is doing a risk assessment of the Tristan volcano; Leon, the islands IT guy who would like nothing more than to move to Cape Town and work there; Jim and his wife, two ex-pat English who are coming to the island to serve as the education officer and hopefully provide a better standard of education to the island population; Charles, a Zimbabwean engineer who is coming to the island to assist with the repair of the gantry crane that was damaged in a massive winter storm; Andrew and Dorian, the owner and logistics manager respectively of the fishing company that owns the Tristan concession (they don’t mix with the plebs in steerage much) and last but not least, the “Bulgarian Lady” (whose name no one can pronounce let alone spell) who is coming out to the island to visit her husband who works for the fishing company. She is the oddest of the passengers, giving the cook sleepless nights with her weird dietary preferences. For instance, she doesn’t eat white meat and believes chutney is poisonous because it combines sweet and sour flavours… How the Asian population has then survived centuries on a diet of things that include a large proportion of things sweet and sour is quite beyond me J

The crew are an interesting group too, mostly Polish (hence the Baltic Trader) with a Cuban 2^nd Engineer, a South African Chief Engineer, a Senegalese steward and a Cape Coloured cook. The Polish crew’s English is very limited, and so they keep much to themselves, the others are far more outgoing and friendly and have done their best to make this trip enjoyable. Particularly Jerry, the cook, who manages to cook really well in a kitchen that doesn’t stay still.

Hopefully we should be able to see the island by tomorrow morning, and even more hopefully the weather will be good enough for us to land. Apparently the harbour at Tristan is situated rather poorly and suffers really badly in a North Westerly swell making the harbour unusable. We shall see what tomorrow brings.

Cape Town to Tristan da Cunha – Thursday to Saturday (25-27 November)

Departure from Cape Town was delayed by two days, the first thing you realise that ships are not like aeroplanes, the schedule is a "best case" scenario, rather than a definite time frame. Anyhow, we finally got underway at 0800 Thursday, just in time to catch the tail end of a 4m swell which will make the next few days interesting…

 
Our home for the (hopefully only) seven days is the MV Baltic Trader, a 250 tonne coaster/passenger carrier that does the regular Cape Town-Tristan da Cunha run to deliver goods, passengers and other essentials that you can't get on a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, she returns to Cape Town laden with lobster from the Tristan fishing concession. She is rather a pig of a boat (flat bottomed, empty holds and 50 tonnes of deck cargo), she rolls terribly even in the flattest of millponds. As I write this, we've hardly left Table Bay and she is rolling through a 40° arc. The remaining seven days are going to be rather unpleasant if it doesn't calm down.