The final day of drilling

Well, that didn't go as planned.

We left station at 6 am with grand plans to finish out final hole (hole 10 of the season). It had been de0iced and left out of the hole for the storm (that wasn't actually that bad), so we put the drill in the hole and started cutting. Nice long cuts - drill was very happy.

Then it got stuck. On the way up from 40 meters, it hit the wall of the hole at 21 m and just stopped moving. Cue Delia to take control and use every trick available to ease the drill from the hole. Panic over, we took a breather and discussed options. I was in favor of counting our losses and calling it done, but the boss said we should continue.

The drill didn't get stuck again, but we did experiment with shoes. Interestingly, everything we tried made the drill behave worse - even going back to the original setup. We were at 80 m, with the drill taking painfully small cuts we the drill came out of the hole making a terrible grinding sound. Some inspection showed that the motor and the barrel were vibrating free of each other.

This is bad.......so we decided to call the hole done as any fix would require several days on station. So we hitched behind the Pisten Bully and towed the rig back to station. An inglorious end to the season, but we have 9 complete hole, so 3 new stations and the scientists say that 80 m is fine for the hole that we have made.

Now we pack. We are waiting for a calm day to fold the tent and we need some heavy equipment operators to lift things for us, but we are on the home stretch.

A science team in the wild

Pisten Bully vs Drill Rig

Drill Rig back on Station

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