Live from Antarctica: Saturday 6th December
Sinterklaas has found us! Amazing, isn't it? When we went for breakfast this morning, we all discovered some local delicacies: chocolate truffles made in Antarctica (to die for!), speculoos (this is, after all, a Belgian expedition!), fresh fruit, and the local touch: Tabasco! For some obscure reason, some industrial amounts of Tabasco have been found amongst the food stock left over from previous expeditions. This is probably why Santa Claus thought we were particularly fond of the stuff.
For once, the weather was nice this afternoon. It allowed us to continue the building work outside: the expansion of the existing garage. The inside team is still scraping wood (floors, beams, whatever they can scrape) and coming out of the station covered in dust.
Today, we witnessed a minor event in the otherwise quite eventless base camp: the leaking of the water tank from the bathroom. This is how we also came to consider how nice an eventless base camp actually is: emptying the 500-litre tank with a bucket, trying to repair the leak and cleaning the bathroom afterwards did a pretty good job at keeping us away from our usual nap!
As for the news from the field: all is well with Alain, who is really pleased with the work done in Crown Bay. The glaciologists are screaming for food supplies but their data-collection is going well, albeit they have been slowed down by the far-from-perfect weather conditions.
Nathalie Pattyn
Picture: Mess Tent - © International Polar Foundation