October 31, 1975: Friday. Joy’s Birthday

Loaded up twelve hundred pounds of food for 1A, after seeing Dr. Treves off at 9:00 a.m. I got to go over to the sideband room and make a radio sched with 066 (at 1A). The bloody Kiwi can’t speak English and I couldn’t get that he didn’t want a wash kettle for shipping wood. He wanted a wood chisel for chipping wood. Oh, well.

Saw a skua today, the only flying bird indigenous to McMurdo. They’re kind of big, like hawks, but with white streaks on the wings. They dive on garbage, etc., but it’s very nice to see something soaring here and at 1A.

Went to 1A to do the ice survey. Calvin levels the level and I stand over by the flag with a Philadelphia rod (a two-yard stick) raising it and lowering it until the mark is level. Then I read the difference from our previous mark. The ice near the drill rig has sunk almost an inch and three-fourths since the surveyor leveled the flags last week. Over 100 tons of equipment and two D-8 bulldozers (57 tons, each).

Dr. Treves is very unhappy about the ice and wants us to go out tomorrow to check the flags again, to see if we’re on the rotten end of the ice deflection.

See, we have this computer printout of ice deflection vs. time, which tells us when to get off the ice. The problem is that there are no units. “That’s O.K. It’s just theoretical, anyway.”

590 had its power steering unit sheered off, so Kath and Peter were pulling a sled all over the countryside. The camp really looks good. The helicopter uses the Hockey Arena for a landing pad. I gave Gene Valentine (the Public Affairs officer) the hockey score, 14-7, Drillers over the Biologists. I told him to put it in the McMurdo Sometimes.

Wrote to Joy. Weighed more food. Went to bed.