September 2023 Ascension Highlights

September has absolutely flown by! This month Georgia started her Youth Trainee placement, we welcomed Cerys from St Helena as one of the new Marine placements, I helped Phil with sewing a new Fog catcher for restoration sites, Anna and I were entrusted with independently carrying out the Frigate Colony population monitoring for Colonies E, C & M during a Letterbox Day (11th Sept) whilst Laura was off Island, and I earned my first green at Kung Fu (28th Sept). We also went to see the new Indiana Jones film at the US base free open-air screening and went as a group to see the Barbie movie at the Travellers Hill Cinema on the RAF base at the beginning of the month. This month also marked my last week of being on Sea Rescue Call as I handed in my radio for good on the 16th September.

This month I have also been working on trying to finish up my last few Letterbox walks to complete my stamp collection. On the 3rd September, Anna and I completed Devils Cauldron to start off my list of walks to tick off throughout September. It was a nice walk, most of the beginning is shared with Weatherpost which we had completed back in December. To get down to the Letterbox we had to head down into a crater which was quite steep, which Anna and I decided to slide down on our bums! After finding the letterbox we then explored around the edge of the Crater and had great views over towards Echo Canyon and towards Boatswain Bird Island.

On the 16th September, Sunitha, Ben, Lorna, Anna and I went to the southern coast of the island to do the Pillar Bay and Cocoanut Bay pair. We left Georgetown around 8am and the entire walk loop took us about 4 hours. We first went down the rocky gully to the Pillar Bay Letterbox and then across the coastline to the Coconut Bay letterbox. We also encountered two hikers at the Coconut Bay Letterbox who were doing the walks the opposite way round to us, which was the first time we’ve ever bumped into anyone else at a Letterbox!

The following weekend (23rd September) Tobias and Lorna then kindly offered us a lift to do the Crater Cliff and Crystal Bay pair of walks. Tobias and Lorna collected Abi, Anna and I at around 8am and we headed to the NASA site to start our hike. It was a very steep walk down towards Crater but once we were down there the views were absolutely amazing. Crater Cliff is named so as its relatively recent volcanic cone of red ash where half of the crater has been washed away by the sea leaving steep cliffs. We saw the fake Frigates which had been placed back when Frigates no longer nested on the island to try and encourage them back onto the mainland of Ascension. We also were able to get pretty close (carefully to not disturb them) to some frigates who were nesting on a pillar of rock to the side of the crater. We also discovered the inkpad in the Letterbox had dried up! After a break at the Letterbox, we then headed along the coastline towards Crystal Bay.

Along the way towards Crystal, we stopped at all the bays to help Tobias with some plastic transect surveys at remote locations. He was recording the number of items in different categories, and we mostly help collect up plastic bottles which he was recording and removing as many as possible to take back to the office to process. Toby can use these to collate information about manufacturers and potential source countries. I really enjoyed the walk along the coastline, it was a really harsh black volcanic coastline.

Crystal Bay was a really interesting bay, I thought it was going to be a little more exciting, it was a little underwhelming but still pretty cool. The beach has a greenish sand which is composed mainly of peridot and magnetite. The Letterbox was at the top of a peak of rock which we had to climb up to. The hike back to the car was pretty intense and steep but I had a really good time hiking. Overall, the hike took us around 5 hours.

After work on the 26th September Tobias, Anna and I headed up Green Mountain to do an evening mountain walk. We walked Scouts’ and looped back on Cronks. This was the last mountain walk I had to stamp in my book and the first time Anna and Tobias had done them. I really enjoyed walking in the evening, there were so many Land Crabs out and about on the paths during the cooler evening and we had great views across over the island. Then on the 30th September Tobias kindly agreed to take Anna and I to complete out final Letterbox walk which was White Horse! We left Georgetown at 7:30am and parked the car near the two palm trees on the NASA road meaning we had a little walk to get to the main path to White Horse. Thankfully White Horse isn’t very far from the main gate, so it didn’t take us too long. We reached the base of White Horse around 8:30am. Anna and I were a little nervous as we’d heard White Horse was one of the hardest walks, having to scale the side of the chalky hill with not much of a path to follow. However, we were pleasantly surprised that the path wasn’t too hard to find or follow and was much less scary than we had expected! It only took us 17 minutes to reach the summit and locate the letterbox. We were also greeted by lots of nesting Masked Bobbies when we got there so we had to carefully walk around them to cause as little disturbance as possible. The summit was a lot bigger than I was expecting and there were lots of Masked Boobies all over. We spotted quite a few with coloured ring numbers which we noted down for the seabird team. The return down was also not as scary as we were expecting which we were glad for. After our hike, Anna and I then went to the museum to let them know we had completed all the walks, as we’d heard you can get certificates for finishing them. We then headed into town for my last weekend at the shops.

This month I’ve also assisted with putting way markers on two paths, Middletons and Mountain Redhill. I joined Sunitha, Jonny and Cerys for putting in the last few way markers for Middletons, I was given the job of building cairns in between way markers, as well as clearing the path to make it a little clearer which way it is to go. I really enjoyed building the cairns, Jonny even told me I should consider taking a dry-stone wall course :D For the way markers for Mountain Redhill with Sunitha, Anna and Georgia finding the path to mark was a little harder. Sunitha, Anna and I had never done the walk before and Georgia had only done it backwards, so it was a little stressful. We used some old cairns as guides, building them up to be clearer and adding a few rock arrows. We then eventually reached the summit and placed some way markers at the top when we reached the letterbox.

Anna and I also had a funny experience during a CRACAB day on the 13th September. When going to fill up the water tanks at Cross Hill an Inquisitive Donkey appeared next to the land rover on the edge above us. It then watched us unload the waters from the land rover and then jumped down to have a closer look! He then watched us carry some of the waters down to the tanks before following us down and watched me filling up the tanks. Then after a while began braying and ran off down the hill to join another Donkey. It was a very funny experience.

One of the things I really wanted to do before I leave Ascension was to have a breakfast BBQ on the beach and have a morning swim. On the 24th September Emily picked me up at 7:45 and Anna travelled with Carson, and we met at English Bay around 8am. We started a fire at the BBQ pit at one of the Beach huts when Toby, Lorna and Cerys arrived. Sunitha, Mel and Chrisna also arrived slightly after, whilst Anna and I were frolicking in the sea and trying to catch mole crabs. We cooked some Quorn sausages, frozen mushrooms and even three eggs (I had been saving for weeks) and halloumi (the south African ship came in this week). It was a delicious breakfast; I was very chuffed. Sunitha also brought some pancake batter she had made but unfortunately, I couldn’t eat them as they were made with almond milk. Mel had also brought Welsh cakes she had made which were delicious. I really enjoyed eating my breakfast at the beach.