Hi folks,
It occurs to me that I've been away for more than a month now, nearly a month of that being here on Devon. It's been interesting -- it's a great people watching opportunity, which I suppose is why it's such a favourite for biomedical and psychological research.
The first week on the island was mostly setup. It was very cold, I was wearing between 3 and 5 layers, big boots, and getting pretty tired pretty quickly just moving around in all of that. It was a few days before we got the diesel stoves up and running, so there really wasn't much in the way of heat to start with. My tent worked out very well, way beyond expectations actually. It's a Mountain Hardware Trango 3.1, specifically designed for extreme weather conditions. Most tent manufacturers make 4-season tents, but experience last year and this year shows that there are 4-season tents and there are 4-season tents. I bought a $250 Kelty last year, which lasted about 2 weeks here before getting blown flat, and had to move to a Eureka that was one of HMP's spares. This year, the Trango ($650 from REI) has been really amazingly good. It's withstood 45 knot winds, remaining surprisingly warm inside. I also went from a $250 North Face Snowshoe sleeping bag last year (which was woefully inadequate, causing a number of lost nights of sleep because it just wasn't warm enough) to a $650 Marmot bag this year which has been toasty warm and really comfortable. Yeah, this is the arctic.
Second week was pretty quiet, more setup, I was mostly doing comms stuff with Steve Braham from SFU. Last week,
brian1789 arrived, so things kicked up a few notches. A bunch of us took most of our equipment out to Drill Hill a day ahead of time, so once he arrived we were up and running within a day. We're already past our depth target, over 5 metres now, so we're now into trying various combinations of torque, RPM, weight on bit and so on in order to tweak up the drill's perfomance and also hopefully induce some faults so we can collect the data and use that in taking the software further.
After a few weeks of long days, 24 hour daylight and 7 day weeks, it starts to grind a bit. We're taking the morning off today and going out in the afternoon. Tomorrow (Sunday) is going to be a proper day off, with a late morning too, so that's definitely something I'm looking forward to.
We have a bunch more to do next week. More filming, probably -- we had National Geographic out at our site yesterday evening filming
brian1789 and myself and doing interviews with us, and there supposedly will be a BBC crew showing up during the week sometime. Wednesday will be an entourage from the Canadian Space Agency and the Polar Continental Shelf Project visiting camp, so Thursday will be teardown and packing for us, and then Friday (most likely) we'll be leaving Devon and heading to Resolute for a day or so. On Sunday, I'm heading west and catching the redeye in Ottawa to the UK, where I'll be hanging out for a week or two before heading back home.
And now... lunch!