Since we’ve arrived, Wenhua and I have been busy with the typical field season preparations: attending trainings for field safety in Antarctica; getting our radios and Iridium satellite phones and trained on how to use them; getting our field gear like water bottles, hand and toe warmers, climbing helmets; and meeting with helo ops and fixed wing to discuss our group’s plans for the season and the sites we want to visit. Of course, we also need to prepare all of our cargo, prioritizing the cargo for the sites we want to visit first but also trying to get everything ready as quickly as possible so we’re ready to go anywhere.
Since time immemorial our group has had an orange shed, which we call The Orange Shed, where we store cargo and equipment over the winter.
We also have some cargo in the cargo lines, such as batteries and tower sections. We store our batteries in these amazing crates that the carpenters built for us a couple seasons ago (I probably showed these in a blog post then, but they’re worth showing again).
One difference with field season prep this season is that we need to schedule pretty much all trainings ourselves, rather than being assigned trainings upon arrival. Work centers here unfortunately are experiencing staffing shortages, and to prevent them getting overworked and overwhelmed, science groups like us need to schedule our trainings with them. We also need to schedule times to submit cargo so science cargo can be ready for who will be coming to bring cargo to them. This makes sense, especially with fewer and newer people working, and it’s just something that we’re adapting to.
But I think Wenhua and I have done a great job with our prep so far! We’ve got pretty much all of our cargo ready to go, have submitted all our helo flight requests, are meeting with fixed wing this morning to get our cargo into the system and then get those flight requests in (there aren’t any Twin Otters in town yet… delays…), and… have our first helo flight this afternoon! To Marble Point I and II AWS to service those. Stay tuned for a post on that trip.
Cheers,
Dave