Wednesday 12th March 2014

This morning it was minus thirteen and the Katabatic was blowing twenty knots. We were hoping to go boating over to Bechervaise Island to bring back all the rest of the biologists gear and rubbish that we left behind when we picked them up. This all depends on the wind as we are not able to operate over fifteen knots. The day turned out to be very busy. Now that we are doing a flying resupply, all our personal belongings and cargo has to now be removed from all the containers and separated due to its priority as most of the RTA will be left behind this year.

This is a major headache for our part time storeman John who has done such a great job getting everything ready to go, only to have to re-sort everything once again. I had to sort out the priority of all the comms gear returning to Hobart and I also had to raise a consignment for a heap of fire fighting equipment that has to be returned to Hobart only when it is replaced by equipment to be flown in. It was still blowing twenty knots after lunch so our boating was cancelled. 

It was freezing cold all day being around minus twelve. I had to find the box of my personal belonging in one of the containers that had some medication packed in it and my hands were freezing trying to open them. They were in the second box I opened so that wasn't too bad. This afternoon we had to shut down our server cabinet to do some wiring changes to the power that was a bit of a mess and also decommission the old VoIP server which meant we lost telephones and computers for a few hours. After the job interview on Monday, they have written back wanting a few references so I think I might have a foot in the door. I also had to do a communications plan for the helicopters as I will be provided a comms operator during the resupply to coordinate air traffic. After work I went and checked conditions on the radio and It wasn't so good today, although I did manage to make a few contacts to Zambia, Japan and Poland.