Team Dieso recently ran the station through their winter Hägglunds oversnow vehicle training. This began with full pre-starts and minor fault finding along with tips on how to not end up owing a carton. Following this, we took the trainees one-on-one out onto the sea ice, to refresh their knowledge of how to navigate using the GPS systems and radars that are on board. This is useful because in blizzard conditions, visibility is often down to zero. On return to station, ‘Team Dieso’ ran the trainees through a complete shutdown procedure and post operation check of the Häggs. This is just as important as the start-up procedure and helps us find problems that need to be remedied.

Some of our expeditioners didn’t get to do the ‘blind driving’ component back in summer, contrary to Rowdy’s believe that this would require some Dutch courage, this is actually just placing a sleeping mat in front of the windscreen so the willing student could not see outside, making navigation by radar mandatory. A special trip was undertaken to Bandits (up north) and Watts huts (south along Ellis Fjord) to change out some fuel pumps and collect generators for servicing: two birds with one stone. Actually, there was only one bird: Greg.

Greg and Rowdy were ‘allowed’ to navigate using the radar to avoid sastrugi and icebergs, so we set off using only the radar and GPS with the windscreen covered as mentioned. The pace was quite steady, thankfully. It takes a lot of concentration to avoid hitting growlers and bergy bits which show up as small dots on the radar screen. The training was completed safely (thanks Rowdy) and the station is much wiser now on the intricacies of the Hägglunds oversnow vehicles.