It was a quiet mild morning with some light ice fog in the air. After breakfast, I headed out with Robert to get the stereo survey done between Lines #4 and #1 in a clockwise direction (essentially hitting the same highlights Jackie had shown on her tour the day before). It was a quiet calm and enjoyable trip. Robert has been an absolute trooper and a really good grounding for my personality. He says the same for me so we are really glad to be buddies on this trip. I think it really helps to know that we have such wonderful spouses tending the home front. I would definitely say that Robert and I have become good colleagues and friends as a result of all the trials and tribulations of this camp.
We worked through lunch to get the stereo imaging of Jen’s ridge. We got in 36 points (see trip report). When we were half way through the Discovery guys did a spot on me explaining how ridges, leads, cracks, dynamics, and thermodynamics work. It was an interesting experience and since I had just finished a good hard morning of work with lots of success, I was feeling very calm and satisfied so the take felt like it went well. My patience was high so I managed to last, missing yet another meal, so these guys could retake and retake me doing the same thing again and again and again.
I got settled in for an afternoon of radio work at the command and control hut to write up all my stuff and spent the last hours of the afternoon catching up on paperwork. We set up the T-shirt sales and they went like hotcakes.
Just after 17:00, Jackie called on the radio to tell Jen that there was a new ridge forming. I tagged along with Andrew and experienced my first ridge building. I drove out with Andrew on the snow machine just in time to see it grinding and crunching away. It was just great. It sounds like a combination of Styrofoam and fingernails on a blackboard. The momentum was the most impressive. It wasn’t moving very fast, but there was this large flat plate that was moving with absolute confidence, like the vessel the Queen Mary heading slowly into port but determined to take out a pier. The speed was slow but the power and the feeling that there is no way to stop this thing was something one was definitely aware of.
Upon returning, I repaired Jen’s serial port with a careful soldering job of the battery connector so she could download the data from her 3 buoys that were recovered from the helicopter yesterday. It meant missing yet another meal, but the recovery of those data from the units that for a while I believed were lost, was worth it.
Tomorrow I’d like to check out the change of events between Lines #1 to Line #4 by way of Lines #2 and #3.
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