Happy New Year!  Actually I have to confess that this is an immediate follow-on from the last entry, but I thought I’d spare you such a long blog .  So here we are at the end of a very long busy stint at Lockroy. It’s been bedlam here for the first week of the New Year but we now have two scheduled ‘maintenance days’. This is essentially a two-day break from ship visits in order to get some of the base restoration work done. I should add at this point that it’s now 9.00pm so I’m not shirking!  I’ve had a very productive day restoring a cast-iron coal stove in the base lounge.  It has sadly endured a lot of cold, damp winters here and has seen much better days.  My task for the day was to show it some TLC and return it to it’s former glory. It took me the best part of the day, but I sanded down all the rust which had accumulated, cleaned out the inside, which was full of more rust, dust, rubble and old cigarette butts (!) and gave it two coats of black stove paint …  all without getting the afore-mentioned paint on the adjoining silver pipes, nearby walls or the floor!  A job well done I thought. I also spent the best part of an hour washing more penguin poo off the rocks down at the boat-shed  landing but I’ll tell you more about that in a minute – ‘oh good’ I hear you cry !

So what have we been up to since New Year?  We spent the evening on board the M/V Professor Multanovskiy, but after the madness of the preceeding few days it was all we could do to keep our peepers open and make intelligent conversation with their guests until 11.00pm. The four of us then returned to Bransfield House in order that the crew responsible for the zodiacs could stand down and we saw in the New Year here with bubbly and Scottish ginger wine . 

After all the busy days and late nights around Christmas we’d pretty much worn ourselves out and each of us had picked up some ailment or other by New Year … which was unfortunate as the week ahead was chock-a-block with ship visits and we were expecting more yachts to show up unannounced any day.  As it transpired we had two ’no shows’ in a row which gave us just enough time to re-charge our batteries for Laura’s birthday on 2nd. We woke up to a beautiful sunny morning and Laura asked if we could have breakfast in our PJs on the terrace – who were we to argue?!  We then spent the morning finishing off painting the roof of the building (to weather-proof it for another austral winter) and re-stocking the shop to prepare for an evening visit by the M/V Fram which would be landing 240 passengers at 8.30pm.  Late afternoon was therefore dedicated to birthday festivities. We never quite managed a walk around Bill’s island but we did temporarily transform the shop counter into a make-shift bowling alley and set up our ‘Penguin Bowling’ pins.  It was absolutely hilarious!  (See photo in January Port Lockroy diary entry on the Trust website www.ukaht.org.)  We cheated slightly by lining the counter with thin strips of wood so that the marble ball wasn’t bouncing off the counter every five minutes, but somehow even with the kiddie-style boundaries we were still pretty rubbish!  Anyone who’s seen me bowl probably won’t believe this, but I actually won – woo hoo!  Thanks so much Lesley – that was a fab and very fun Christmas gift!

 

The Fram passengers  arrived promptly at 8.30 and it was a great visit, not least of all because Anja, the Expedition Leader had announced on the ship that it was Laura’s birthday and literally 70-80% of the passengers made a point of asking where she was and wishing her a happy birthday.  Some also brought her little gifts such as crisps and wasabi peas, the chef made her a beautifully decorated chocolate birthday cake, which was delivered ‘avec sparkler’ and the Captain sent over a bottle of Champagne!  It was so so nice of them and I think that all in all she (and by association, the rest of us) had a really fab day.

 

The 3rd was an exceptionally busy day with visits from FIVE vessels!  Definitely our busiest day of the season. We had two average sized expedition ships, one private charter on a small luxury expedition ship called the Hanse Exlorer and two yacht visits.  Despite having so many vessels however we were well within our IAATO site guide limit of 350 passengers per day.  Needless to say however it was quite intense!  The following days we had two more ships in, including the Polar Pioneer. At this point I’ve realised I forgot to tell you about their two fab British chefs (Graham and Andy), who pulled an absolute corker at the end of their last visit before Christmas.  As all the passengers were leaving, a zodiac returned to shore and they delivered us the most fantastic pizza I’ve ever tasted along with two tubs of home-made coleslaw!  Bless you Graham and Andy! This week we were invited on board for dinner and we were looking forward to another delectable treat.  It was a curry night with all the trimmings and I was actually delighted when my body warmer smelled of curry rather than penguin the following day .

I’ll finish this entry off by giving you another quick wildlife update. In the days which have passed since I wrote the Trust blog entry at the end of December, chicks have been hatching all over the island and growing at a phenomenal rate.  The first thing that happens is that their tummies swell out, then they seem to shoot up.  Bizarrely, the thing that has shocked me most is how quickly their feet grow!  They seem to triple in size in the space in the space of a couple of weeks. The colour of their fur also seems to even out a little over their heads and backs too and their tummies seem whiter, so they’re just little soft grey and white fur balls with big round tummies resting on their big clown big feet!  When they’re tiny they tend to nuzzle head first back into their parents brood pouch, but as they grow and no longer fit, in nests with two chicks they will often rest their heads and necks on one-another and their parents will protect them from the wind as best they can.

The Humpbacks have also continued to feed in the bay, so we’ve continued to indulge in a spot of whale-watching out the window and we still have plenty of Weddell Seals hanging out at Bill’s Island.

‘GUANO-GATE’

This finally brings me to ‘Guano-gate’ and the reason why I spent this afternoon cleaning poo off the rocks down by the boatshed!  On 7th January I had my closest encounter with Port Lockroy wildlife to date. We’ve been asked many times if we name the penguins and until very recently we could honestly say, ‘No, absolutely not, they all look the same and we’re not that soft’.  However, there are a couple of nests that we’ve kept a particularly close eye on since the chicks have hatched. One is ‘Fussball’ (football in German – in keeping with the international crowd that passes through here), Son/Daughter of ‘JCB’ (whose nest is the largest on the island, built with the most enormous stones that we can’t believe he managed to fit in his beak!).  Fussball is an only child and as such is reaping the benefits of all the krill his parents can pump into him/her.  He/she is absolutely enormous and spends most of every day sleeping off his last meal. Nevertheless, it’s always quite entertaining to see how fat he has become on any given day. So after the Corinthian II visit I was off to the boatshed to get some more supplies to make dinner and thought I’d just wander a tad further around the back of the boatshed to see how Fussball was getting on. Nothing major to report, he was sparko as usual, but as I turned to walk back down the smooth rock face I didn’t put 2 and 2 together that it was so slippy and landed very ungraciously on my bum in all the fishy penguin guano which had accumulated over the previous days – HEEEAVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  The only small saving grace is that I was wearing ‘over trousers’, but I still managed to get them, my fleece, my possum-fur ‘fingerless’ gloves and hence the tips of my fingers absolutely caked in it – nice!

So the reason why I washed all the poo away was to save anyone else (or more to the point, me) a similar (repeat) fate!  You’ll be pleased to hear Nikki got full photographic evidence and those photos will be posted to give you all a chuckle in due course .

 

P.S.  The photographs in Wildlife and Christmas and Happy New Year have only just arrived two days ago on CD from Judith.  I’ve selected some out of hundreds!  They don’t necessarily relate to the adjacent text as some were taken a few weeks ago, but hope you enjoy seeing a few of them.

Margaret (Judith’s Mum)