The first thing upon arrival to Mawson Station is a station familiarisation so we know where things are. There’s a lot going on during the resupply, and much to go through during the change over from the 73rd ANARE to us, the 74th ANARE. With helicopters and cargo coming in, people from both teams doing jobs for this, still keeping the station running, having a team still rostered on for fire and emergency response, individuals doing the handover with their counterpart trade, and then as soon as they’ve handballs their job, they’d fly out to the ship.
One big task for us when we got to station is the handover, where each person gets a walk around and shown their workspace, what they need to do for their job (of course there was a fair bit of training for each trade back in Hobart), or where things are at with projects, maintenance and anything relating to their job. Some of our team have been to Mawson before, others have been to other Antarctic stations where things might be similar or quite different, and others are complete newbies like me. The previous FTO Mark Savage, was a great guy and it was his second time to Mawson so was very knowledgable. He’d had two roles at Mawson - storeman and FTO. I’m lucky that I’m just doing the FTO role, and we have someone else, Simon, doing the storeman role. Mark spent the first day doing the handover with our storeman, and the following day we did the FTO handover. So if my mind wasn’t already chocka-block full of new information from the weeks of training in Hobart, it was now bursting at the seams trying to absorb everything on station!
What we did do during the handover was head out for a day in a Hägglunds onto the plateau, to the Framnes Mountains. There we went to Fang Hut in the David Range, across to Rumdoodle hut in the North Masson’s, and Hendo hut on Mt Henderson. All three locations were great, offering different walks and climbs, as well as features for training such as wind scours, with huts all in varying positions. We looked at local hazards such as crevasses, as well as drive the main designated routes that are all on GPS with canes marking the way, all helpful for navigating in the Haggs in low visibility. We had a sunny calm day for our trip, and it was fantastic to be out there and see the mountains which made me excited about trips we can do out there for training, operations, and of course recreation. After another morning of head-filling info from Mark about the Mawson FTO role, he was suddenly whisked off in the helicopter.
The Mawson resupply took 16 days as the two helicopters could only do up to four flights a day. Fortunately we had pretty good weather for most of it, with sunny, calm days, and only the occasional windy or low visibility day. Luckily all our personal luggage and our alcohol came across, but building materials couldn’t which means some of the renovations and projects won’t happen this year. Food was prioritised for how versatile it was and what the chef needed, so things like butter and eggs were prioritised over say, gluten-free Week-bix, although we got that too even though no-one on station is gluten intolerant, but we didn’t get a lot of fresh produce or nuts or other foods we would have liked - go figure!. The chef even got a scoby from Davis station to make kombucha but in the transportation of it, the bag it was in got both soaked in fuel and the jar of scoby smashed, so no kombucha this year! At least there was sourdough starter already at Mawson from the last chef so we can have nice bread.
