• Polar Pyramid (party style tent impervious to harsh weather)(25kg)
• Cook box with stoves fuel and all the cleaning and cutlery (15kg)
• Water (20kg)
• Fuel (10kg)
• Generator (20kg)
• Sleeping gear and mats (15kg)
• AMISOR Tech box full of computer stuff and some tools (30kg)
• Survival packs X 2 as there were two of us (40kg)
• HF and Satellite Phone (15kgs)
• Me (fully clothed about 90kg) + Adam(fully clothed 95kg)
• Total 375kgs
What a ridiculous amount of stuff to go on the helicopter for a four hour download! The download is from a site drilled with hot water last year that has a range of instruments at the bottom of the 600m hole in the ice. There are some loggers to record turbidity, temperature, salinity, conductivity and goodness knows what else. Most of these store their information at the device so the download takes a long time to retrieve as it is a very long cable, but some of them record on the surface. To complete the whole download at AM04 (Amery Ice Shelf sit 5) it would take about nine hours. We were dropped off for four and a half so could only get half of the data before having to return. With the unpredictability of the weather at the moment they are not prepared to leave people on the ice overnight as it is too close to the ships arrival to risk.
I had to set up the tent and make sure that the tech was comfy and had assistance with anything that was needed. So hot drinks food and making sure that the tent was sorted in the wind as well as a bit of digging to find buried cables. It was a very strange feeling as the helicopter left us in the deepest of deep field locations and stuck on the middle of a massive ice shelf with only limited supplies. Makes you feel just how small you are in this world of Antarctica as if the winds picked up we may have missed the boat!
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