Departure!

Today is the day! The ship leaves in just a few hours and this is the last bit of interneting we'll be able to do for a couple of weeks. Etienne, the South African PhD student who's going to do part of his thesis at KTH, gave us a link to a website where you can see how far the ship has progressed on it's voyage down south. The address is
http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shipposition.phtml?call=ZSAF

Yesterday we learned more about what it is we're actually going to do down at SANAE. There is a narrow band VLF antenna, that is used to receive very specific signals from senders located all over the world. These signals are for example used to communicate with submarines, as they can travel far through water. The signals will experience perturbations, due to electron precipitation from the magnetosphere. The precipitation is either a short burst; in that case it is caused by Whistler waves, originating from lightening in the northern hemisphere and travelling along magnetic field lines down to Antarctica, or the precipitation lasts for a longer period of time, in which case it is caused by chorus waves taking energy from electrons in the magnetosphere due to wave-particle interactions and causing the electrons to fall into the loss-cone. A genious way to use the military services to learn more about science!

However, this receiver does not work at the moment, and it is our task (together with Daleen and Marlie) to figure out why. One problem could be the preamp, but it could also be problems with grounding. Grounding is very hard at Antarctica, as we can't even be sure that the enormous rock the base is situated on, is actually in contact with Earth and not just lying on top of ice! There are also other things to work on, like putting duct with cables from the instruments down to the base, a distance of about 500 metres! Well, at least I have practise of such digging work from Svalbard! =) I must say though that if someone had asked me 10 years ago I would not have thought that in 2009/2010 I'd be spending my days digging cables and duct on both poles!

Yesterday morning we went with Andrew to the beach early in the morning, to go for a swim. It was quite windy and we weren't really awake yet, so no swim for the Swedes, instead we watched Andrew jog along the beach and then jump into the water! The South African viking! Of course the real reason why we didn't go into the water was really that the beach looked very much the same as the one where we had seen a white shark lurking on Sunday...

Andrew jogging along a beautiful sand beach early in the morning

Well, that's it from us for a while, we wish everyone a

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

We're back online in 2-5 weeks..

-Hanna

Gear check and Cape Town

Today we saw our ship for the first time! What a feeling! We went into Cape Town early in the morning, to get our equipment and to hand in our passports. It turned out to take a whole lot longer than expected, as everything had to be tried on. We don’t want to get down to the base and then realize that the boots don’t fit or that your hat doesn't go with the colour of your eyes. We had a lot of fun doing it though. After an hour we were finally equipped with two enormous bags each of ‘stuff’, and we realized that all the incredibly important can’t-live-without stuff we brought from Sweden is not going to fit in the luggage anyway, so we will have to leave lots of things behind in Hermanus! Considering how extremely fashionable we look in our new gear, I’m sure we’re not going to lack our old clothes… =)

This is how cute we look in our Antarctica gear!

After the equipment procedure, Andrew and Agatha dropped us off at the waterfront, and we spent a few hours wandering about Cape Town. It’s my favorite way to explore a new place and to get a feeling for the city. We walked from the waterfront into the city centre, visited the old castle and just breathed the atmosphere. Cape Town is a weird mix of old and new, many of the buildings feel so 80’s, whereas suddenly you come across a Victorian house, or a modern building. For example, my favorite statue (sofar) is of a classical African figure in rock, with Bart Simpson sticking out his head here and there. As we return from Antarctica we will hopefully have a few days to do all the things one should do here, like climb the Table mountain, visit Cape Peninsula and the Penguins at Boulder beach, and go to a vineyard. No time for those things today unfortunately. When returning to the waterfront we spotted our ship across the harbor, you can see in the picture below what she looks like! Isn’t she a beauty? This will be our home for about 2 x 14 days!

- Hanna

Our ship, SA Agulhas, in the Cape Town harbor, getting ready for departure

How come all other popular destinations are in a completely different direction than ours?

With most of the stress from last week released, we've had some time to relax and to enjoy some of the many pleasures offered in South Africa the last few days. After having acquainted ourselves with the water yesterday, we decided we'd better ought to find out what was actually lurking underneath the surface today and go for one of the well-marketed white shark cage diving tours. We set off early this morning (again together with Agatha) and drove about 30 minutes to Gansbaai, where breakfast and a fast boat were waiting for us and nine other excited participants. The ocean was completely calm and clear blue, with an amazing visibility. After about a ten minutes ride on the boat, we stopped in the middle of the bay and the preparations of trying to attract the sharks by throwing mashed up tuna remains into the water began. Soon, four sharks were circling the boat, smelling the prey. Meanwhile, we had gotten ourselves into wet-suits and goggles, a task neither very easy nor pleasurable as my legs were rather severely burnt after the kayaking yesterday (read "red like lobster tails") and the wet-suit two sizes too small. The cage, seen in the image below, wasn't very impressive nor assuring, but it did its job (we're still alive, both of us! :) ).



You couldn't really see much from the cage apart from a few meters in front of you, so we had to trust the shark spotting capabilities of the crew above us to tell us when hold our breaths and go down into the water. Most of the times, the sharks swam quietly by, showing up their big muscular bodies, three to five meters long and with a black and white coloring.



At some occasions they did show their jaws though, in attempt to grab the bait that floated in front of us. Once they even crashed into us, which got the cage shaking vividly and us into a state of petrified excitement. After maybe as much as an hour in the water (we just lost track of time!) we climbed back up on the boat, dried up, had a coke and some chips and turned back to shore. The rest of the day we just spent relaxing in the shade, doing some laundry and preparing for our Cape Town visit tomorrow. All in all a very pleasureable day!

-Tobbe.

Hermanus

Sofar we're having a wonderful time in South Africa! We arrived to Cape Town on Thursday, where we got picked up at the airport, and driven to Hermanus (about 120 km east of Cape Town). There we went to HMO, Hermanus Magnetic Observatory, where Andrew was waiting for us. The weather is just wonderful, about 27 degrees and mostly sunny, or some clouds. Since we arrived on a Thursday afternoon, the weekend was just about to start (!) so everyone who's going to Antarctica from HMO (and everyone who was in a mood for some beer) went to a beer brewery for a bit of socializing. We met Agatha, a South African researcher who's working now in Norwich, UK. She's also here to visit a short while, so we decided to have an adventurous weekend together. Today (Saturday) we went out sea kayaking, the weather was lovely, sunshine and some clouds, and the water was about 19 degrees warm.. We paddled through lots of waves, and got to a bay where the seals were playing just a metre from our kayaks!! It was amazing! We didn't bring our cameras then of obvious reasons (we were completely soaked when getting back) but I managed to catch some of the African wildlife on Friday, so I'm inserting the photo of when Tobbe found a new friend here instead. They had a great time together!Tomorrow we're going for even more adventurous things, we'll tell you more about it then! And on Monday we're heading in to Cape Town to get our gear for Antarctica... The boat leaves on Wednesday.

-Hanna

More preparations, and a travel flu

Tomorrow's the big day, and I'm looking forward to it with nervous anticipation. It's hard to know what to bring when you don't really know what to expect.. even though I've read quite a bit about the place, the only thing I really know is that the continent is filled with about a kilometer of ice on average, it's larger than Europe and filled with basically nothing but vast open space. I guess that will feel even more weird when we're 80+ people crammed into the small research base. I'm sure to have people snoring into my ears for a few months straight..

We completely emptied our local pharmacy on sea-sickness pills the other day (we bought up their entire stock!) so that is one essential thing that we have packed now. There are probably 20 other things we've forgotten all about though.. I just hope we'll realize it while we're still in South Africa and not on the boat already.

- Tobbe

Preparations and travel fever

Two days left before departure, and it's due time to start the blog we've promised everyone, so here it is! On this site you will be able to follow our (amazing) adventures at SANAE, the South African research station on Antarctica, but before getting there we will spend one week in Hermanus, SA, preparing, and then 12-16 days on the boat SA Agulhas, most likely with a green face and the nose over the rail. The packing has started and panic is in the air.. wonderful! I dug out my ice axe today and wondered for a second if we are the only ones to ever bring ice axe, crampons, skiboots etc on a flight to South Africa?

On Saturday I got Lonely Planet - Antarctica as an early christmas gift from Rolf and Margareta, this will be my bible during the next three months! According to LP SANAE is the most modern station on Antarctica, which sounds nice. It even has a bathroom for people with disabilities!

We just noticed 'wooden gloves' on the equipment list, as well as 'suits freezer', which got us really excited about what adventures this trip will include... We'll keep you updated (as much as we can, no internet on the boat and limited access from the base). Now it's time to get back to packing! Tomorrow I plan to buy three months supply of chocolate, I think I'll spend tomorrow evening repacking...
-Hanna