3 months in! The end of December marks the halfway point for our 6-month season in South Georgia. As the height of Austral summer, Christmas is a busy time in the ship schedule – we opened our doors for 21 ships and 3642 passengers this month.
Our core museum team of four live 1km away from the British Antarctic Survey and Government of South Georgia neighbours at King Edward Point, so all together we live in a small community of roughly 25 people on island. People coming and going is a big deal down here and familiar faces on base have had a bit of a shake up in the last weeks – we said goodbye to outgoing Director Dee and sadly flying visit from Curator Jayne with the Commensalis team but welcomed in Curatorial Assistant Helen and 545 Antarctic fur seal pups to keep us company instead.
The seals barricading the store.
The pups have been getting braver and starting to venture off on their own. This has interfered with our work in the museum a little! The wildlife has right of way in Grytviken and it’s important to keep our distance and not disturb them. And so, the phenomenon of ‘step seals’ has become a hallmark of December. Fur seal pups having a nap on the front step to the Whaler’s Main Store meant we weren’t always able to open the building for visitors – their house, their rules!
Christmas came early: our food store building looked very healthy packed with a delivery of ‘freshies’ and everything else just in time to cook a proper Christmas dinner.
17 hours of daylight has given us plenty of time to pack in a lot this month. On top of our usual work of boarding ships to talk about SGHT’s work in South Georgia, giving guided tours of the whaling station to hundreds of visitors, and running the museum and shop, we also processed and bio-secured a whole cargo delivery of stock for the shop and lent a hand to our neighbours at King Edward Point to process the annual cargo drop, which brings us our dry and frozen food supplies for the season (and Livvie still found time to oil the signs!)
Living and working in a small, isolated island community means it’s up to everyone to put in the graft to organise social events and mark occasions properly. Our Museum team got out the tinsel to host all of base to decorate the Church in Grytviken (we plied them with homemade mince pies, dhal and mulled wine for the occasion) and Rachel took the lead on organising a proper carol service on Christmas Eve – just like the Whaler’s did here in the 20th century. We even had Rudolf in attendance. Christmas Day was spent as it should be, sharing a four-course Christmas dinner with the whole of station before the Museum were back in action on Boxing Day to welcome in eight more ships before the end of the year! Overall, a very memorable and busy way to spend a Christmas in the middle of our second summer of 2025 – we’ll update you on what we get up to in 2026.