The rain in the South Atlantic falls mainly here - 9 August to 14 August

Clouds are Gough's party piece, I have never seen such awesome ones as I have here.

Well thus far August has lived up to it's reputation as the month with the worst weather. Over the last two weeks we have only had a couple of days where it has not rained a lot. When it isn't raining, the wind has been blowing. All of this has played merry hell with my work schedule, I have been trying to do the final round of herbicide spraying at Snoekgat, Diesel Cove and Crane Point. I can't spray the herbicide when it is raining because that is just like pouring it into the sea and when it is windy, all I succeed in doing is covering myself in poison and getting none where it needs to be. Thankfully on Friday the weather was good enough and I was able to complete all the spraying.

Snow again.

We have even had some snow again to go with the bad weather, unfortunately it fell on Tuesday night and then rained almost continuously on Wednesday, only stopping for long enough for me to take the picture above and the panorama at the top of this post. The bad weather has meant that I have had plenty of free time to play with Hugin (hugin.sourceforge.net), which is simply the best, most user friendly panorama creator that I have ever found. I used it to make the panorama at the top and with a little help from Photoshop, the one below as well.

The view from the roof of the Base.

Sadly, along with the bad weather comes more cabin fever. Mornay has been on form this week. He refuses to talk to anyone, sulks in his room and is incredibly rude to everyone. John and Leonie have spoken to him on more than one occasion, asking that he at least attempt to be civil but he simply ignores them. He singles out Michelle as a particular target because he used or still does have a crush on her and she is not interested in him at all. I really don't care what he does with the rest of his time on the island, if he wants to spend it sulking in his room, I could not care less but he really does at least need to be civil. Manners cost nothing. The Department really needs to step up their psychological screening programme because I cannot understand how someone as obviously broken as he is got to the island.

GLS data from a logger recovered from a Skua. Gough Skuas, as with the Marion ones seem to spend lots of time off the Cape coast

Oh well, it really is not long now, the ship will be here in just over a month and in just under two months we will be docking in Cape Town. How nice that will be.