On the evening of January 4, Campbell Island appeared on the ship's radar. Soon it loomed out of the mist. We arrived at Perseverance Harbour around 9 PM, having arrived 24 hours earlier than planned. Sea lions cavorted around the boat while giant Royal albatross cruised the cliffs above the harbour. Campbell Island was windswept, cold, misty and starkly beautiful in many shades of gray. The complete team suddenly appeared on the deck, having made a miraculous recovery from their seasickness. Congratulations all around was followed by a meeting with Nigel and the crew of the Braveheart. They would help us get the equipment ashore at 4 AM. Antennas were top priority. We could only pray that the weather would hold.

Jan5: Up at 3.30 AM and on to Campbell Island by 4 AM. A look around showed many buildings suitable for our operating site and in the end it was decided to set up the eight complete stations at the old Meteorological Office. The building had many empty rooms and was perfect as our centre of operations. Simultaneous CW and SSB operation on the same band was a priority and it was decided by Declan and Andrew that two antenna sites would be developed. The first antenna field for SSB was sited north of the building and the CW antenna site was developed south of the shack.. The separation was 200 metres.

 The sea lions were incredibly inquisitive, very aggressive and quite territorial. As we landed they played around the wharf and foreshore challenging us with large grunts. Later on in the morning, as we were assembling the yagis with the 15M and 20M monoband yagis on the ground in pieces, two young male sea lions approached aggressively, and chased several team members around the building. The sea lions then reclaimed their territory, which unfortunately was covered by two very large yagis. Chaos reigned with sea lions, guy wires, yagi elements, nuts and bolts, hand tools, coaxial cables and guy ropes all mixed up together. After much laughter and a lot of running by the team members the sea lions departed the antenna assembly area. We stayed a safe distance away as they left and worked the rest of the day looking over our shoulders.

 The sea lions were always crashing through the brush around the antennas. It was inevitable that one would drag an antenna guy wire. We looked in disbelief one morning at our beautiful 40M four square vertical array that became a three square array overnight. The culprit was a sea lion that snagged a guy rope on a flipper. The aluminium vertical pole bent and snapped about 2 metres off the ground.. Declan and the antenna team repaired the vertical and it was back in service within a few hours.

 After 14 hours of setup time without a break, both Nagara WARC antennas, the 20M Force 12 and Cushcraft 20M yagis, both Cushcraft 15M 5el yagis and the two Cushcraft 5el 10M yagis were in place The 30M Gladiator vertical, 80M vertical and Battlecreek Special 80M/160M were installed the next morning. All equipment was off loaded from the boat and the generators were ready for operations. The next day, starting at 4AM, saw us setting up the shack and running antenna tests. We could actually hear amateurs around the world taking about ZL9CI before we went on the air. The whole ZL9CI site was ready to go in 29 hours of setup time. The weather was perfect.