Poor baby drill

After the greatest drilling day ever, we have had two dreadful days back to back. The weather is beautiful, and herein lies the problem.

We headed out to site to lower the drill and move the rig to a new station. It was cold initially, but the sun did it's thing and everything was very warm by the time we got moving. We also had a visit from some mechanics to recover the snow mobile we couldn't start (battery and spark plugs apparently).

Once at the new site, water was dripping out of the barrel of the drill. This is a real issue, because we can't leave the drill horizontal or else the water will freeze and the auger won't turn, but we can't leave the drill vertical without a hole to put it in (at least a 6 meter hole). So we drilled a hole, cause the ice that we cut to melt and then re-freeze in the drill and then we had to de-ice the drill.

But we ran out of time (we have to be back on station by 18:30 everyday), so we were not able to de-ice the drill properly. Cue today - we tried to drill but only had very short cuts (0.73 m). This suggested that we had an ice block. We planned for this and borrowed a heat gun and some blankets from station and we spent the morning de-icing the drill. It went pretty well, but we wanted to be cautious about letting it cool before we cut anymore ice. So we are going to do that tomorrow.

Oh, and our PLC (the brain that controls the drill) seems to have developed an intermittent fault. Yay!!!!

Hopefully tomorrow goes better, but at least on the way home we could pay a visit to the science team.

Snowmobile recovery team - Caleb and Nick

Delia raising the drilling tent

Drill rig is ready to move

Time to heat up the drill

Station 34 being deployed by the Science Team - Eric is in shot

Nils and Delia walking around Station 34

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