Blow, blow, thou winter winds

We have just survived Mid-Winters week, which is as the name suggests is smack bang in the middle of winter. While the solstice is treated as no real biggy in the Northern Hemisphere, it is much cherished down south and treated with very much like a Christmas atmosphere in Antarctica… with a week off, lots of events, BBC World Service broadcasts, and pressie giving on the 21st. It was a fun week.

Considering the amount of physical challenges, i.e. the Winter Olympics and drinking challenges, i.e. the base bar crawl we all survived remarkably intact. And mentioning the bars, some of them were spectacular: ice caves dug into the cliff face...

...the timeless classic of grabbing a beer while attached to a bungee rope, the transformation of the surgery into a kinda seedy torture chamber (just look at the glee in the eye of the mad doc!), but personally in was the dive chamber that took the biscuit.

It just takes one second, and only one second, for a tiny amount of food to appear on a face before a full fledges cream fight ensues. But my lasting memory of this will be two of our Scottish contingency dutifully carrying on playing the violin while chaos and mayhem ensues all around them; all I could think of was the scene from Titanic where the band kept playing on the deck as she began to sink with all panicked around them.

Classic memory.

Each day had its moments and all through the week we constantly received Greeting messages from our entire fellow over winterers around Antarctica… we even had a message from Tony and George W! Blimey.

But the big day is Thursday, June 21st, Mid-Winters Day…

As sure as the sun will rise

Yesterday the sun set below the horizon, as it does every night all over the world, the difference for us at 67 degrees south is that today it didn't rise again. It is the first time in my life I have experienced a day without a sunrise. Humans are designed and have evolved around the pattern of the sun, and I will admit I am more than a little curious to find out how it will affect me. In actual fact I haven't actually seen the sun for a few weeks now; it hasn't managed to rise above the mountains surrounding Rothera, and won't see it again until July. We're not in pitch-blackness at the moment, and during our solar noon it's more like pinky twilight for an hour or two, but this light is noticeably deteriorating each day.

This is the midday scene now on Rothera Point! Strangely enough we seem to get more light now from the moon that we do the sun, and as it's equally important to lighting up my world I realise I have never paid so much attention to the cycle of the moon than I do at the moment.

I have to say, although the lack of sun is a perculiar experience, so far I am quite enjoying it… and imagine being into photography and only having to stroll outside at 11:30am for a spectacular sunrise shot, and having a sunset that lasts all day… albeit a rather short day!

This land is made for spectacular sunsets, but unfortunately only for this short period of time; it is now less than two weeks until mid-winters day and so only a few days until the commencement of 24 hour darkness that will last several weeks. Best dust off 'The Thing' DVD for its annual outing :)

But as always, our companions throughout the dark and cold are our squawking friends, the Adelie. These are two of my favorites taken at midday about a week ago… all very natural and second nature to these guys.