David Knoff’s team had nearly come to the end of their year in Antarctica when the knock-on effects of the pandemic hit. | By Felicity Lewis
If you’d been in Antarctica for 537 days, living with colleagues through 23 hours of darkness a day at minus 30 degrees in winter, what would you miss the most?Some 5000 kilometres south of the nearest cow, Antarctic expeditioners use powdered milk , although on the station where Knoff worked they did have a commercial-grade espresso machine at their disposal, one with the “flicky-flicky” grinder and “bang-bang” bin, as he describes it.
“I’ll get straight to point,” he told his team. “There are no flights this season. We’ll be staying another summer and heading home via ship in early 2021.”It’s a chilly winter day when we meet at St Ali, and Knoff’s wearing just a shirt with his jeans. Here is a man who, almost exactly two years earlier, was swimming in a hole in metre-thick ice in shorts, trainers and gloves ; a man who survived yanking out his neck hairs and some of his beard when they froze to his neck buff one day .
In his book, Knoff recounts his management approach. “Senor Burrito,” he says to assembled colleagues, “I ask not that you identify yourself to the masses but that you apologise to the chef who had to clean up your mess at 4am.” The apology was duly given. In Antarctica, Knoff’s limits are tested as he seeks to lead a bunch of people from various work “gangs” marooned on the world’s least liveable continent. “Mathematically, it doesn’t look that bad,” he says of the six-month “extension”. And practically, the station had enough food for another year .
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