Hi All,

I realise I’ve pretty much neglected this blog for the last month, almost to the day! And the longer I left it, the more of an issue it became to start posting again. I also realised that July marks a full year since I’ve started working for British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge and I thought it’s a good opportunity to start blogging again.

Getting there

Let me start with a quick review of the past year – and what a year it was!

• As you may remember from this article, I’ve applied to BAS in February 2013, in March I received an email with an invitation to an interview for mid April, which went well as beginning of May I received a job offer as Data Manager, with my post starting in July.
• That started a long-ish three months of preparations and finally my relocation from Dublin to Cambridge.
• I’ve been working and training for about four months in Cambridge, and I was finally ready to go.
• Then the actual journey South took place in December, and I finally arrived to Antarctica, and my new home for the next 15 months, just after Christmas.

And this was only a start!

Being there

Many things happened since my arrival and I’ll never forget them, however there were a few highlights:

• Switching into Winter Mode, after all Summer Staff’s departure
• My first Winter Trip
• The scenery, views, weather, auroras and other phenomena

We celebrated a number of Antarctic special days like the Sun Down and Midwinter Day, not to mention my own birthday!

What the future holds

We’re past halfway through the winter and the 106 days of darkness, with a little more than three weeks left until our first Sun Rise (which again will be a big celebration). We’ve experienced heavy blows (50+ knot winds gusting to 70 kt), low temperatures (-43°C, feels like -60°C), darkness, isolation and solitude. We are lucky to have a brilliant team of thirteen men and we have all built friendships, hopefully for life.

After the Sun comes up things will start to get a little bit more busy, with the second round of winter trips, followed by the first planes arrivals in November scheduled to do over 100 hours of flying before Christmas and the first call of the RRS Ernest Shackleton. The Shack will bring the Summer Staff and the new Wintering Team (our successors), and this will kick off the relief operation as well as hand overs. In the mean time we will hopefully do a number of visits to various scientific sites (Lifetime of Halley – LOH, Low Power Magnetometers – LPM and Automatic Weather Stations – AWS) to service them and to show them to our new colleagues. Hopefully we will also arrange a number of trips to the nearby Emperor Penguins colony as well as some ice climbing trips. Finally I’d like to fly my kite again and I’m sure there’s a number of other things I’ve forgotten to mention!

The second half of my stay here is really shaping up to be just as good if not better than the first! Stay tuned for more…