At Last

Ok, so, this took me quite a while to get set up but eventually I now have a blog down here at the south pole. All the summer crew left about two weeks ago on a C-130 and 43 of us are now here at the pole until the first flights arrive in October.

We are currently busy making the station all set up ready for the winter. Just last week we had to roll up about a kilometer of fuel hose which is used to supply the planes when they land. In a normal world they would have an electric system which wound the fuel line in. At the south-pole they need to keep us busy to stop us going mad, so instead we did it all by hand. It was good hard work but after three days outside, the novelty really wore off and the frostbite kicked in. Still I have to say I've not slept so well after those three days for a long time.

Today's job was a little bit more straight forward. We had to lay flags about 3 feet apart that guide us to where the telescope is about a kilometer from station. In the middle of winter with no moon that's about as far as we can see in a storm - In fact we don't actually see them, we hear them. Highlight of the day was getting a sled ride back towed behind a ski-do.

This evening I also did a first which was Yoga - It's odd: relaxing and bloody painful at the same time. I'm not convinced, however, I'm going to get the full benefit as I played Fussball afterwords and any resemblance of a calm, relaxed Ross, soon disappeared into a world of expletives and petty violence against inanimate objects.

So, some of the things I've learned here so far are that

• I'm crap at Fussball
  
• -48 C is not that cold....
• -48 C with a 25 knot wind is bloody cold
• Ski-do's are a lot of fun to drive
  
• LMC (Big red thing with tank tracks) are even more fun to drive (I'll try and get a photo)

I'll fill in more details about things that happened before I got the blog started as time goes on. Tomorrow we're bringing all the drinks inside for the winter so lots of fun moving stuff - But that is another day.....