Resupply (part 2 of 4)
Tuesday 28th March 2000

After the reefers had been unloaded, we started to unload all the warm store containers. These containers contain all the non perishable food such as flour, sugar, canned fruit, breakfast cereal and the like. They also had to be unloaded fairly quickly since they could not be left outside standing in the cold over night. Again, we formed a human chain from the container which was parked at the door of the greenstore to the final resting place on the shelves. Each box was either passed from person to person or loaded onto trolleys.

In the greenstore waiting for a reefer container to be unloaded from the log-skidder so we can unpack it. Note the conveyor used to slide the boxes along.

One of the containers was accidentally dropped on it's side, so when we opened it we had to sort through the boxes and pick out some of the crushed cans of condensed milk which had split open. Luckily not very much was lost in this container.

The whole process of unloading the food containers took about 10 - 12 hours over two days, and involved a lot of hard work by a large number of people. I had a great deal of fun opening each of the containers and sort out the boxes, in the process becoming very familiar with what quantities and types of food we had at our disposal over the coming winter.

The process of unloading the AA and transferring the containers from the ship to the stations wharf involves the use of jet barge. The jet barge can carry one large container or a number of smaller E-type containers. A larger floating barge pushed by the Aurora Australis II ( a small powered boat which is unloaded from the cargo deck on the AA) was also used.	The" reefer" food container arriving at the wharf ready to be unloaded by the crane.
These two boats would take it in turn to line up beside the AA and receive a container from the ship when move across to the wharf where the crane would unload them. While this was going on I had a video camera setup watching the harbour and I managed to get some very interesting time lapse video footage of the jet barge / large barge moving to and fro between the ship and the shore.	The Aurora Australis II pushing the large barge up against the AA. The E-type containers on the barge contain some of the Return to Australia (RTA) rubbish from 1999.

Email continues in part 3