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OK, so what can I say about my time at Halley VI 2012 - 2013, bloody hard work, disorganised chaos, pretty poor food, I could say all of these but I won't as this isn't really about work although if it wasn't for work I wouldn't have had the privilege of being on the Brunts Ice Shelf. There's a bit of background to Halley in Part One so I won't bother repeating it here. My first impression of Halley, be it V or VI, is one of insignificance, a tiny blot on the vast frozen landscape, as the ALCI Dakota banked over HVI the line of Blue & Red sticks out like a sore finger.

At the time of our arrival HV was still the designated landing strip, aircraft weren't able to use Halley VI until later in the season until the main comm's set up was all in place. We landed around midnight, unloaded the plane & headed into the base to grab a cup of tea & something hot to eat only to find that nothing had been left out for us as the base commander didn't think it was particularly important or necessary despite knowing we hadn't eaten since morning & it would be a couple more hours until we'd get to our bunk room at Halley VI & still be on site at seven the next morning, it wasn't the first rumblings over food & it wasn't, unfortunately, the last.

So began the chaotic comnpletion of Halley VI, despite all the food based tribulations over the following months HVI did get completed, BAS did shut down HV & did move into their new accomadation before we departed at the end of February in the meantime . . . .

For fun & frivolaty there's disctinctly less options availble than at Rothera, site of my my earlier Antarctic visitations, so what can you do, well for those who like to run you can run around the 5Km perimeter, for those who like to walk you can walk around the 5Km perimeter, forthose who like to Nordic ski, well, you get the picture, there were a few who'd been before & had snow boards & kites, or pursuaded somebody to tow them around behind a snow mobile, unfortunately I wasn't one of these but I did spend some considerable time falling over whilst trying to remember how to cross country ski, you forget just how hard snow can be & how many bruises you can get on your arse.

Really this pretty much wrapped up the external activites, we did attempt on New years Day to have a game of soft ball, which I was quite looking forward to after my endeavours on Ascension Island back in 2010, unfortuantely we only had one bat & after half an hour or so it split in two, bummer.

Indoors it was what you'd expect, dvd's, lots of dvd's, books, cards, chess, weights, spinning bikes, darts & table tennis, well table tennis until the floor started to collapse as the snow under the floors began to melt away, buggered the league for sure, a couple of sad gits played golf, as expected lost balls were a regular feature.

Looking back things could, & should, have been a lot better, we all certainly expected it to be however the site was suffering from the mad dash to get all works completed & the relocation of accomadation etc from HV to HVI, comm's back to the UK was poor, it was either a pretty expensive phone card via a duff sattalite system or email, the likes of skype was out of the question & as for those misguided jocks who live thir lives on facebook, haha, not ideal & certainly below the standard of what had gone before/was expected, moral got pretty low at times to be honest.

I have to say at this point that the lowest of the low for me was Christmas Eve, not only was it a sad time to be away from family but I got a shitty email from a mate informing me that a friend who I saw most weeks when at home & whom I'd known for nigh on thirty years had fallen down some stairs & was dead. I spoke to his old man but what do you say, life can be a real shit sometimes, no parent should have to bury one of thier kids, unsuprisingly I couldn't do anything about attending the funeral but Kate went on our behalf, RIP Mr Brooks.

So, what else is there to say, we watched the Union jack raised of HVI for the first time, some muppets with to many beans ran a half marathon, HV to HVI, I got to drive a SnowCat a couple of times from HVI to HV & back again, we had a few interesting nights watching old film reals from the 1950's & 60's of checky shirted pipe smoking husky driving BAS stalwarts putting the great into Great Britain. One night I ran a pub quiz, I enjoy doing this, sad man that I am, as expected I got hassled & heckled but it seemed to go down well with most who participated.A significant reason behind my involvement with Antarctic works such as this is the wildlife, unfortunately once you get inland of the Antarctic coast this rapidly disapears. At HVI we had one solitary visitor, a lone Adélie Penguin that stopped by for a week or so & was named Gary for its trouble.

Other than Gary we had the obligatory Skua on the look out for a free meal as well as occaisional fleeting visits from a clutch of Wilson's Storm Petrel's, these little beauties never seem to touch down & are so fast it's hard to keep track of them, I believe their nesting spot was some seventy miles or so away so I'm not quite sure what brings them to Halley, maybe it's just curiosity.

The highlight for anybody interested in wildlife at Halley has to be a visit to the nearest colony of Emporer Penguins on the coast at Windy Bay.

To get to Windy Bay, around twenty five miles from Halley V, takes a couple of hours in a SnowCat, in past years I'm told its been simply possible to walk down onto the sea ice without much problem, this year however it involved roped access down an ice cliff.

As you can probably imagine several thousand penguins who've all survived on a diet of fish arn't going to smell nice but with chicks all around nobody is going anywhere fast, well not until the ice breaks up anyway around the end of January. From reports last year there wasn't a lot of sea ice on the coast & what there was broke up early & washed away before the chicks had developed proper feathers, needless to say many didn't survive.

So far the photo's I've posted show relatively clear blue skies, but even in summer it isn't always like this, there are some days like below, when if it wasn't for the flags from the accomadation to the site you really wouldn't know which way to go, some days it gets so bad you don't go out of the door.

One thing worth mentioning was that on Friday November 25th 2011 at some ungodly hour in the morning we had a partial eclipse with the moon covering around 80% of the sun, unfortunately I hadn't been aware of the impending eclipse before departing the UK so it had been a hurried preperation to try & knock up filters from welding masks & sweet papers, on the morning of the eclipse unfortunately the weather wasn't at its best & the photo's are, well, pretty crap really, but at least I can say I was there.

With the mad rush to wrap the project up & our departure rapidly approaching it was good to see the Union Jack raised for the first time over HVI, Christmas & the new year came & went & before we new it we were packing up our kit, trying to explain to the BAS winter crew how everything worked & desperately hovering, polishing & generally making things look pretty & so it was on the 26th of February we threw our kit bags into the sleds, piled into the SnowCat's & headed for the coast to rendezvous with RRS Ernest Shackleton & the other lads who'd made it the previous morning before the weather turned bad.

The RRS Shackleton is the second of two ships in service with BAS, she was built by Kverner Klevin Leirvik A/S, Norway as the MV Polar Queen for the Rieber Shipping of Bergen in 1995 & aquired by The British Antarctic Survey in August 1999 & renamed RRS Ernest Shackleton after, suprise, suprise, Sir Ernest Shackleton.

Finally on board the Shackleton wasted no time in heading out to sea, destination Stanley, Falkland Islands.

The voyage is around six or seven days depending upon weather, sea ice & whereabouts on the coast it sails from. I've no problem with boats/ships but I do find them a bit tedious so I try to spend as much time on deck watching the wild life.

For the first couple of days we were pretty much 24/7 in ice & once or twice had to backtrack as it was getting beyond the ice breaking capabilities of what the Shackleton could deal with or least slowing it to a crawl to the displeasure of the captain.

Eventually we cleared the ice which regretably meant that wildlife was restricted to following birds & an occasional raft of penguins.

Roughly half way to the Falklands, around South Georgia & the South Sandwich Islands, we spent nearly 24 hours literally sailing in circles looking for a BAS transponder that had gone off the grid, most people agreed to spend at least a couple of hours on deck on the vain hope of spotting its beacon, unfortunately the weather crapped out & between choppy waters & fog you were lucky if you could see your hand never mind a needle in a haystack.

Seven days after leaving the coast of Antarctica we sailed into Stanley Sound & tied up at FIPASS.

As I normally do when passing through the Falklands rather than working there I cram in as much as I can, a trip to see the Rock Hoppers at Kidney Cove, a tramp across & along the coast to Gypsy Cove to watch the Jack Ass penguins & a stroll along Surf Bay to watch the Peale's Dolphins playing in the surf before heading to Mount Pleasant to pick up the flight back to the UK & there it ends until next time !