DAVID KNOFF - FIELD LEADER

David Knoff is a former army officer and Davis station leader. He was field leader for the Denman Terrestrial Campaign, managing personnel and Edgeworth David base camp.

What were some of the biggest challenges, managing a group this size in such a remote location? You're living in a tent for weeks on end, in 60 knot winds and it’s −10, −15° Celsius and your water bottle is freezing in your tent, but the minute the sun came up, everyone was so keen to get to work again. And that was interesting, having to manage the fatigue of others because they’d work until eight o’clock at night and be up and ready to go the next day. Sometimes I’d have to say “OK, we’re going to do a half day tomorrow. We’re going to get a good sleep and have a late start so people can recharge”. 

You’ve been a station leader before, how different is it being a field leader? Stations are quite routine. At the start, you’ve got resupply and handover and there’s a set list of procedures to follow and through the summer, you’ve got very clear objectives – the ship is coming, or the runway is opening and then flights are coming in and out. We had none of that. We didn’t run to a calendar, we made everything fit around the science, which meant the weather dictated what we did.

How important was weather forecasting? The Bureau of Meteorology has three forecasters at Casey and one based in Hobart, and the support we got was incredible. To be able to get accurate forecasts for so many different locations meant that every afternoon we’d look at the forecast for the next couple of days and say, OK Monday looks good for this area then Tuesday, it’s better somewhere else, and Wednesday it’s going to be limited so it’ll just be a half day. Sometimes if the helicopters were grounded people could walk to a sampling location and walk back, or camp if they had to.

How did the day start? The generators would start up at 6am and then you’d get yourself up and dressed and make some porridge for breakfast. One challenge we had was that in −10° Celsius, honey isn’t overly liquid so we repurposed a battery heater to be a honey heater. Then we’d sit around a WhatsApp conference call at 9am for a weather brief – myself, the pilots, the senior field training officer, the science coordinator and the comms operator. Most of the scientists would gather around a central spot near the coffee, so we’d go in and confirm the plan for the day.

How many people could the choppers take at a time? You could get five or six in there, with the pilot, but it really depended on how much gear there was. If a group was doing sediment coring or rock sampling, they’d have some really heavy drills or they’d be bringing back a lot of samples so it could take two or three trips. The helicopters were actually used to do science as well – the hot water drilling teams used a ground penetrating radar so there’s a radar attachment that they’d sling under the helicopter and they’d fly over the ice and do survey work.

How often would you set up a remote camp?   There were about a dozen and some were for very long durations. RAID 1 went for about a month but others were just three or four days. We did a lot of overnight trips for the drone UAV teams because it was often easier just to send them out with all their gear and they’d stay out there and fly their patterns.

There was a delay at one stage because one of the helicopters needed a spare part. How did you manage that? They kept a spare engine at Casey so that every possible part they could need was there. The original plan was to send an engineer to get the part but in the end they sent the whole engine back to Bunger Hills, very carefully packed!

It sounds like the schedule was pushed to the limit to get that last bit of sampling at Mt Strathcona done. It was getting very late in the season and there was pressure to pack up the camp and start sending people back to Casey. That was probably where I earned my money as field leader because I had to go OK, we need to walk the fine line between wringing out the last important science we need to do, retrieve a few instruments that we still had lying out in the middle of nowhere and start packing up the camp. We started to make things a bit more austere – we packed up the shower tents and started to get rid of the freezers, so dinner became a bit simpler and the vibe changed but people were just so happy to get the last of the science done. And we finished on a very high note, which was an absolute blue sky day.

DON HUDSPETH - PROJECT MANAGER

Don Hudspeth is Operations Planning Manager at the Australian Antarctic Division and Project Manager for the Denman Terrestrial Campaign.

Don you’ve been planning this for nearly two years. It must feel good to see all that preparation pay off.  Look we tested everything in Hobart first. The kitchen was set up at a local warehouse in Hobart last year, to make sure everything worked, and we engaged an expert to help with field camp design. There was a lot of consultation with chefs and about the amount of electricity we’d need and it all worked terrifically well. There were a few minor glitches with the generators but you get that, and we used some solar hubs in the field to keep things a bit quieter.

Was there anything that didn’t go to plan? There are always unanticipated aspects. People asked to spend more time camping in the field but they actually spent more time at base, flying out to their research sites. We ended up using more fuel than anticipated but we changed helicopter types from single engine to twin engine. We put 300 drums out there last season and thought we might need more and we did.

Edgeworth David Base camp has been packed down for winter. Is that a big job? We got terrific help from Casey’s trades teams with that. They were extra hands but they were also fresh hands and that really helped because people were really tired by then. All the tents have been pulled down and containerised so hopefully it’ll all be useable next year.

What happens next year? We’re setting a maximum of 25 to 30 people – we had 40 this year – so there’s a reduced number of scientists going back, either to do science that hasn’t been done before or to retrieve instrumentation. Given we’ll have two helicopters again, it’ll be a similar set up. We might rotate people to Casey and back to give them a break a bit next season but we’ll see – you need some people all season for continuity but you need to be careful you don’t burn them out. Some people were really tired by the end of this season. A huge thanks to everyone at Casey who helped so much. It all worked really well.