December 5 – Ready for anything to happen

Listen to Audio of Wally's Call (.wav)

I’m calling you on the 5th of December from Punta Arenas, still with what will really just be a weather report, some activity report about the team here in Punta Arenas as well.

After I last spoke to you with yesterday’s dispatch I actually thought we might get deployed in the evening after the 8pm scheduled radio contact with the meteorologist at Patriot Hills.

You gotta be ready for anything to happen. What I actually did was I went down to the supermarket and bought a baguette and some snack food in case we had to go to the airport in the early evening here.

But I also stopped by, there’s a new North Face store in Punta Arenas and I stopped by. You might think I stopped by to grab some last minute equipment for Antarctica but I actually stopped by the North Face store and bought a really nice new shirt to wear out to dinner in case we didn’t go.

Gus was actually the first guy to figure that out – he showed up at dinner the other night with a nicely pressed new North Face shirt right off the rack. And I did the same thing last night. As it turned out I wore my new shirt out to dinner.

Will’s favorite restaurant in Punta is an Italian restaurant that’s right down the street from our hostel. We’ve been eating there quite a lot, last night we had king crab calzones. So we weren’t too bummed out about not flying to Antarctica.

This morning at 8am we talked to Patriot. They reported winds at 21 knots gusting at 29, too high for the Ilyushin to land but more discouraging was the fact they reported that the horizon to the east was nil and to the north it was poor. In other words clouds were coming.

At noon today it was even more cloudy and now at about 6:00 pm local time I’m waiting once again for the situation I just described to you which was the 8 o’clock radio call, after which we’ll likely shut down again for the night and wait for the weather to improve in Antarctica.

The North Face shirt still looks good. I’m not sure if we’ll rent a video tonight and stay here at the hostel or if we’ll go out to eat again but life’s not bad in Punta, we’re anxious to get to the ice.

The Ilyushin is still loaded with our gear for Antarctica and we’re still ready to go when we get the chance.