Lauren Elliott: Looking back on Lockroy

01/01/0001

It’s been about two months since I returned from the most magical place in the world – and I returned with new skills, new knowledge and most importantly a new polar family. For those of us in the team who have travelled or lived away before, it is a shared feeling of sadness and excitement when you leave somewhere you have made your home to return to the realities of life and back to the people you love and have missed. However, our return was different to any of the teams before us and plans of bombarding your friends with penguin photos, family gatherings and a Port Lockroy team reunion soon dissolved when we landed back in a country that locked down within days.

The lockdown provided me with a lot of time to reflect on my experience in Antarctica. I remember so clearly the feeling of opening the email inviting me to the selection process. I felt excited, nervous and overwhelmed; I also recall reasoning that this incredible experience could actually happen. I had a real chance of living and working for UKAHT at Port Lockroy. The selection process was across two days with so many different tasks, and the other candidates were the most interesting and intelligent people I had ever met in my life. There were times I felt absolutely out of my depth. It is interesting to look back at selection and the interactions I had with the team that went down south.

There was Vicky, teaching me to tie knots when we built a raft, a skill I took to Port Lockroy and used every day!

Kit helping me carry a barrel, his helpfulness never wavering the entire season.  

Heidi, who led a task during recruitment, encouraged a different and more logical way of thinking – a skill she took down south and revealed many Port Lockroy life hacks!

Lucy telling me that Port Lockroy is a special place and it will be hard to communicate that with people back home when you return. This I now completely understand.

The people you live and work with at Port Lockroy will stay with you forever so I want to take a moment to thank them all for being incredible and answering the many questions I had during our time there. But most of all for the moral support when crossing the Drake passage. Antarctica is a place of discovery and 2019/20 was when I discovered I suffered from severe sea sickness. Living by the sea my entire life and spending endless hours of past summers swimming who would have thought?! Returning home people ask “Were there any negatives?” and despite spending an entire day in bed on the Drake I don’t view this as one; it is all part of the experience.

Antarctica provides so many unforgettable moments, from whales swimming by to the glaciers, and the first tiny head of a penguin chick. The experience of seeing the entire lifecycle of a Gentoo penguin is one of my favourite because you get to watch them daily and you witness a tiny egg survive and thrive to taking its first steps into the sea. I have definitely carried home with me an awareness of wildlife and find myself stopping to watch birds fly and secretly hoping to see a seal in the water where I run.

I learnt so much during my time in Port Lockroy from the history of the base to the behaviours of Gentoo penguins. It was an incredible experience that I think about every day and I hope one day to return.

Lauren