South Africa: ‘It was agony being away from her’

Original Post Date: 2010-02-24 Time: 23:00:02  Posted By: News Poster

Fourteen months in the Antarctic can seem like an eternity if you have just fallen in love.

This was the case for electrical engineer Erick Minnie of the University of Potchefstroom, who returned yesterday on the SAS Agulhas with the rest of the over-wintering South African National Antarctic Expedition (Sanae) team members.

Asked to describe some of the highs and lows of his experience on the ice, Minnie replied: “The low was leaving and the high was coming back. And seeing the aurora; that was also a high.”

Breaking off every few sentences to hug or kiss his girlfriend Mariné van den Berg, Minnie added: “It was a bad experience being away from my love for so long. I met her only seven months before we left and it was agony being away from her. I’ll definitely not repeat that again. I’m with my love now.”
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There were scenes of jubilation on the East Pier at Cape Town harbour as family and friends waited on the quay to greet both the over-wintering team, who had spent 14 months at the Sanae base, and the summer team, which went down for just a few months.

Rory Meyer, an engineer from the University of Pretoria, said his job had been to ensure the observatory equipment at the Sanae base was functioning properly and gathering data correctly.

The low point for him was when all the water pipes at the base froze and burst in mid-winter, leaving the team without water for about three weeks.

“We had to go out and dig up snow and boil it in a kettle. The pipes were very well insulated but somehow something shorted,” he said.

The highs for him were Christmas day, when most of the others had left the base to work at the depots, and only four of the team were left behind, and seeing new faces for the first time in 11 months when a Canadian team landed at the Sanae Base.

“They were taking some Russians to the German base. It was good to see new faces. On Christmas we had a braai for lunch outside the hangar and made saamies that big,” he said, with his hands far apart.

Meyer said there was one really bad experience when Johann Jamnek, 25, the team’s senior meteorologist from Johannesburg, was killed in October while climbing near the Sanae base. The team was practising crevasse rescue techniques with other team members when the accident happened.

“Johann’s passing was bad. We’d all been together for nine months already. The team was pretty shook up, but we all pulled together and helped each other through it,” Meyer said.

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