Well after the mad rush to get up here we have got about 10 days before we finally fly out onto the ice and set up our fist camp. Of course there is always an inestimable amount of work to do before departure so I expect we will be organising and preparing right down to the last minute but given that our freight hasn’t yet arrived we are taking the opportunity to have  few days of down time.

One of the biggest problems out in the high Arctic (And I’m sure most of you know this) is communications!!! Not only does the cold bring everything to a grinding halt but our sole communication uplink is via a satellite system called iridium. Whilst people have managed to send back videos from the Arctic before during expeditions, it is an incredibly difficult , time consuming and tricky job. For those of you who are lucky enough to remember internet when it was in its infancy and we all had standard dial up connections (52kb/s), it took the best part of 10mins to get up the most basic website and video was inconceivable. Well our connection on a good day is about 5 times slower!!! Thankfully we are in a unique position in that the expedition is relatively static and we are not limited by time and weight. We will be doing our absolute best to send back regular videos for you through out the trip to show you what life is really like out on the Arctic ocean. However you will have to bare in mind that despite the fact that we are filming the whole trip on a broadcast camera the footage we will be posting on the site will be quite low quality. Hope you enjoy the videos and please be patient during our first few weeks as we iron out our teething problems that we will inevitably have.