Another anniversary, sinking boats and a storm - 21 February to 27 February

This week marks another anniversary, it has been three months since I left Cape Town and saw Table Mountain slowly drop over the horizon.

Work-wise this has been a quiet week, I have mostly been waiting for a chance to conclude the herbicide spraying of the Sagina infested areas around the base. Fortunately careful inspection of the areas has turned up only a few of the plants (less than twenty in total) which is a good sign that the control programme may in fact be working.

Sunset on Wednesday, no sign yet of what was to come

Every Wednesday is Skivvy day, where we divide up into teams and clean the whole base from top to bottom and then may continue with whatever else we had planned for the day. However this Wednesday was a little different because Leonie (the medic) decided that the team needed to practice a rescue. I was chosen to be the guinea-pig. It went ok, for a bunch of people without a clue, but if they had been on the Rescue Team, they would not have passed muster... It was very difficult to keep my mouth shut...

I also got to do some "caving" under the base, installing new network cabling because the mice have eaten the cables. I have no idea why they would eat the cables but they have and they needed replacing and I was stupid enough to volunteer. It was quite fun until you crawl over a rotten Petrel carcass left by a Skua.

We also got to experience our first winter storm this week. It was incredible! Basically what happened is a hurricane that was headed for Brazil was diverted by a high pressure North of Gough and hit us. It also hit a small yacht, Spraydust, en route from the UK to Brazil, crewed by her owner Tom Morgan, his wife and a friend. She was about 40nm North of Gough when she lost her mail sail boom and the mail sail wrapped around the mast, preventing it from being furled. The sail then ballooned out and stopped them from doing anything other than running with the wind. For four days they battled to keep afloat and were driven towards Tristan. Finally on Saturday they were rescued by a super tanker. It was a harrowing experience to listen to their communications with us and Tristan; and a wonderful relief once they had been rescued.

Storm swell

We got a chance to see what they had been experiencing on Saturday when we went down to Crane Point and saw the swell breaking against the sea stack just off the point. The swells were so large that when they broke, the spray was driven higher than where we were standing which is about 30m above sea level. It was quite sobering to see the full might of storm that the crew of the Spraydust had been through. You can get some idea from the video below, I apologize for the shakiness but the 80kts of wind and hail made it difficult...