Travellin’ South

Update on August and I’m off on holiday tomorrow…

I’ve clearly been busy in August because I don’t seem to have found the time to update this blog (and I’m hurriedly writing this as I really need to be packing my gear to leave on my second winter training trip tomorrow morning!). Hmmm, what have I been up to? Well, we’ve had good weather and bad weather in equal doses this month. During the good weather there have been more visits to the repeater on Reptile Ridge, and the now usual long spells out in the cold on any clear night to make the most of the darkness while we still have it – summer is approaching and in just a couple of months we won’t have much night-time at all. Night photography at Rothera will be a thing of the past for me at least…

Winter trips are out again so every evening I’m in the ops tower chatting with the field parties over the radio, checking everyone’s safe and well. We’ve had a couple of fairly monster storms with winds over 60 knots on base at times so a good deal of lie-up was had by a couple of the teams in the field, their return to base delayed until the weather calmed down enough for safe travel. The forecast for the next couple of days looks about as good as it gets although it’ll probably be a little chilly where Dave and I are heading, round to the south end of the island.

We’ve had some more nacreous clouds over the peninsula although these ones didn’t stick around so long and I wasn’t up early enough to catch them before sunrise when they’re at their most colourful. I’m still not sure about the best way to photograph them – this is a HDR shot which, although a fairly good representation of the scene, doesn’t get across just how bright the clouds really are. They are just jaw-droppingly amazing.

It’s been a weekend of clear but very windy weather and, after the battering from the storms, the sea ice around station has broken up. At the ice edge birds are mostly engaged in a feeding frenzy and I’ve spent a bit of time trying to get the hang of photographing them in flight. Yet another photography learning curve that needs to be climbed but there should be fair opportunities over the summer and I’m not exactly going to be doing much night photography!

OK, that’s about all I’ve got time for, I’d better get back to packing my gear and then get an early night - it’s probably going to be a long day in the cold tomorrow…