We were fully aware that we had some excess luggage when we started the journey however when we came to check it in to Air Canada in Ottawa we came very close to just leaving it in the airport. At first I laughed at the man because his accent was so strong that I thought he had simply made a mistake and the translation was lost in his deep French pronunciation. After some clarification we all stood in total silence as they wanted more for each bag than the original cost of the flights. Once again Charlie launched into a full frontal verbal assault at the man, this time however the conflict of the strong French and Scottish accents nullified each other and they both just displayed a look saying ‘I’m sorry, are you speaking to me? I’m afraid I didn’t understand’. At that point the credit cards came out and we swiftly moved on.

Home hasn’t exactly been relaxing yet and we took Easter Sunday off before getting back to work on Monday. We are off to France tomorrow to see my family and enjoy a few days training in the warm and the sun.

After a few more long days working away we managed to get camp looking fantastic. The shower was… I want to say brilliant because out in the middle of the Arctic the concept of a shower is a little on the ludicrous side. The truth of the matter is that it brings back floods of memories of being in Africa when you have to contort yourself into unusual positions just to get your whole body wet. Once that is achieved, under the incredibly slow (and short lived) trickle, you have to try and get all the soap of before the water ‘tank’ runs dry. Regardless of all that we can wash ourselves and we have grown quite fond of our little shower.

The kitchen sink has performed fantastically and we can wash up all the dishes after every meal now. It has all become so efficient that we even empty out our meal bags out onto plates and sit around the table to eat them. I have no idea why but they seam to taste much better of a plate rather than in a bag. Speaking of efficiency we have established a routine with the heater now and are able to keep the temperature in our home at a perfect level. We do have a hose to connect the heater directly to a 45 Gallon drum and run the heater continuously but despite the additional hassle we found that we can monitor the fuel far more efficiently if we run the heater from the 5 gallon jerry can on the back. When the Jerry can is full we can run the heater on its lowest setting for between 9.5 and 10 hours. The lowest setting is ample to keep our home warm and when the fuel runs out we can leave it about 2 hours before having to relight it. We have had long debates about the toilet and have agreed and settled that it will stay outdoors in the ice. Cold as it may be dealing with the pluming of an indoor one is just not going to be realistic at this stage.

We have taken to a regular fitness regime and every day we walk, ski, run or hike up at least one of the hills. I was so excited when we reached the top of one of the big ones to see that there was a clear run of snow down one side. Although the bindings and boots are not exactly designed for skiing and I didn’t execute it in the most graceful of manners I couldn’t resist telemarking down.

Excuse the change in tense here but the story was written in staggered instalments.

After all the work we put into getting our home up and running we then got a devastating call from the London head office… we are coming off the ice!!! For a whole host of reasons it has been deemed that our job is done and we are on our way home. Our extraction was synchronised with the main resupply for PAM and we then had to completely disassemble our home. We all felt a little shocked and sat in silence for a while, I suppose each of us was thinking the same thing one way or another and then starting to get on with job. The flight was delayed by a day giving us enough time to return the whole place as we had found it ( Well not exactly as we found it, we didn’t fill the cabins back up with snow. We actually took great care to board up the doors and windows to protect them) and then Charlie hopped on the plane as it came through on its outbound leg to go on up to see Pen, Ann Daniels (mother of 4) and Martin (sweat cheeks) while Katie and I made final preparations for departure. Once everything was packed and out by the runway Katie managed to get her very first glimpse of an animal, a wolf. The wolf was actually rummaging around the bag with the cameras in so we couldn’t get a picture but Katie was very excited to see her first wild polar animal none the less. The plane was late on its return leg and Katie and I had taken to trying to guess the song that we were singing songs through our emergency whistles to try and stay warm. The flight home was quiet and sombre and we all sat staring out of the windows watching the polar ice below (and Katie wants me to mention the enormous pink moon).

The latest instalments have been; a new kitchen with sink built into the worktop, a shower cubical with changing area, coat rack and boot area, fuel bund with dispensary taps, and an external home for the generator (with chimney for the fumes). Last night we even put up a dining table, found a few old plates and I made us beans on toast … who could ask for more!

Even with all these luxurious home comforts we have surrounded ourselves with, life isn’t quite like being at home, there is always a longer process involved in receiving the end goods. The shower for example. If you decide you want to have a shower you must first collect a bucket of snow, leave it by the heater for several hours to melt, then fill the bag with nozzle attachment with the water and put it up on the top shelf over the shower, then leave for several more hours for the water to warm in plastic bag. We purposely built the shower right next to the heater hoping sufficient hot air would rise to the roof of the porta cabin and heat the water sufficiently to take the Arctic chill off it. Tarka is about to try the first shower this evening so we will see…! Another example, Charlie pointed out to me the other day as he came in laughing at the randomness of cold weather living, was when he could hear sawing and wondered in to see what I was creating next, only to find that was in fact sawing away with the large wood saw, but what I was desperately trying to cut through was the weeks rashen of cheese!

I even managed a short run this morning up and down the runway, my poor lungs were the only thing to suffer, with every freezing inhalation causing a deep burning pain. Couple more days and I am sure they will have got the gist.

We are working on the video of camp but having a few technical issues…will keep trying.

With all expeditions or adventures, things are for ever changing and plans are never set in stone. The operations team in London decided due to a change in circumstances for the next month our ‘Floating Support Base’ will in fact be far more useful at Isachsen. As we have mentioned before Isachsen is on the northerly coast of Canada, and although I can see the sea ice from our camp we are in fact on land and therefore not ‘floating’.  In 3 to 4 weeks we will be moving out onto the ice at about 85º north, but for now we are taking in a different landscape equally as beautiful and just waiting to be explored. The exciting part of being based at Isachsen is our new home. We have temporally discarded the tent and have spent the past 3 days, working right around the clock creating an a truly palatial arctic dwelling in some of the old porter cabins left over from the research station based up here in the 60’s and 70’s. Many of the cabins have been heavily snow damaged, filled to their roofs from spin drift. However, after digging for 2 hours to clear a route to the medical hut we were overjoyed to find that the door and windows had remained tightly shut all these years and it was almost as good as new. The space is perfect for our living quarters but the boys wanted to have an additional cabin to store our food and barrels in. So feeling thoroughly over ambitious we set about digging out the porter cabin opposite to the medical hut, which unfortunately had not had its door closed for all these years and had a hefty amount of snow and ice inside for us to remove. Due to it being open to the elements it was very cold and damp inside, so to get the heat from our heater in to dry it all out, Tark’s and Charlie set about making a sealed tunnel/walk way between the 2 porter cabins with a door for entry!! All made out of bits and pieces, and using tools, we could find and dig out of the snow up here at the top of the world! Well the boy’s have excelled themselves, amazingly it doesn’t look half bad (from afar) and will do the job just nicely. It will take a day or so for some of the heat to filter into the second porter cabin and evaporate all the ice and damp, but when it does we will be in the height of arctic luxury. Talking of luxury, we have even dug out a porter loo to save our bums from the elements, although there was something special about our original ig-‘loo’ (…will have to make another when we move out onto the ice in a few weeks.)

In addition to our fab new home we have been graced for the past 3 days with absolutely stunning weather, you couldn’t have it better, perfect blue skies, not a breath of wind, 14 hours of sunshine and a mild -24ºC. One more day of DIY and we will be able to explore the mountains. We will post a video of our DIY in a couple of days.

Oh and the heater…what a beast!

Clearing out the last bit of snow – it was up to the top of the door!

The bad news is we are still in Resolute Bay! It’s been 6 weeks since we left the UK and the FSB team have only spent 6 days out on the sea ice…how depressing is that!!

The only good news to come of our continual delays, is that we were able to wave off our new friend, the Italian adventurer Michele Pontrandolfo, on the start of his latest adventure. He is on his way to attempt another solo expedition, this time to the 1996 Magnetic North Pole.

We have spent the past 2 weeks enjoying Michele’s company and helping him with his preparations. He has been here at South Camp Inn completely on his own, no support crew and no project manager, so I think he was grateful for a few friends to mull over kit problems as they arose.

He will now man-haul his 2 sleds 600km from Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island to the Pole on his own and unsupported. He is due to finish near Isachsen in approximately 40 days. If you can read Italian and want to follow his journey visit his site Artiko.

For my part I am heading out to do some training now, I think Tarka has some abseiling planned for me and possibly various techniques of creating snow anchors for belays. Best get walking as I have to get to the top of the cliff before i can learn how to go off it!

Friday has the next plane with our name on!

The great news of the day is that Pen, Ann and Martin managed to get their resupply and they all seem in very high spirits as they continue along their journey Northwards. The not so good news is that our flight out onto the ice has been delayed again due to bad weather and the aircraft is not available over the weekend… so we are now all crossing our fingers for a Monday drop off. In a bid to try and overcome the irritation of having to patiently sit and wait for our flight back onto the ice we have started training for our next trip. Oh yes… of course it was never going to be long before we decided on our next trip and true to form here we go. Unfortunately I cant tell you what the project is just yet but I can tell you that it requires us to be exceptionally fit and strong and of course it is a world first!!! What possible better training ground could we ask for than the Arctic for such an endeavour?

We have been devising a training schedule that will fit in with our surroundings and daily work whilst out on the ice. Staying fit out here is considerably harder than it sounds because you have to be careful about sweating and the intense cold. We’ve spent most of the afternoon pulling our pulks over huge blocks of snow and ice and I caught this photo of Katie wrestling her 110kg sledge up and over the boulders.

Well there is only 1 twin otter in service currently at Resolute and so we are in a queue behind the re-supply for the ice team and the Polar Continental Ice Shelf. Due to bad weather the ice teams re-supply has been put back two days already which mean we are not going to get on the ice until Wednesday or possibly Thursday at the earliest! let me out, let me out!!!

FSB’s Red Nose Day Celebrations

Our new heater has now arrived, hooray! So all being well we will be back out on the ice on Sunday, and not a moment to soon, as poor old Tark’s is suffering pretty badly with his allergy still, and various sources have put it down to the chemicals in the water here at Resolute. We will be testing the heater thoroughly and rigorously tonight to make sure it does exactly what it says on the tin, but thanks to all Ron’s advice from International Thermal Research Ltd I am feeling incredibly positive that we have a fantastic piece of kit from Pioneer Space Heaters. We are all scratching at the doors to get back up on the ice as we didn’t even have time to take in our surroundings last week. It is after all the cold Stark beauty of the Arctic Ocean that we signed up for, so on ‘take 2′ we hope to endure it with a smile.  When we do return on Sunday we hope that the pile of kit that we left out there is still in tacked, our tracking beacon is still beeping away with the kit’s location however,  we  won’t know until we get out there whether the kit is buried under a pressure ridge or floating in an open lead!

Some pic’s from week 1:

Frosted Tark’s

The pressure ridge behind camp

Charlie in the ‘Coal mine’ (at midday)

Charlie trying to fix heater

The second reason was medically more concerning. Unlike PAM we are not man hauling large sledges during the day and so keeping warm became a real issue. Unfortunately in order to stop ourselves getting cold weather injuries and keep the fundamental communication lines open we had to light our cookers. These in turn gave off relatively large amounts of fumes and so we were forced to keep them on for very short periods punctuated by walks around camp to get fresh air and stay warm. We had a very serious discussion to try and ascertain whether we could hold out safely until the first resupply was due in about a week. Unfortunately despite our original evaluation it quickly became apparent that in order to prevent the situation deteriorating into an emergency and not only causing further risk to ourselves but also to PAM it was decided that we should get off the ice.

7 days after we had  waved good buy to the guys in the twin otter they were back again to pick us up. They even had a doctor on board to check us over on the way back to Resolute. Truth be told it was such a relaxing sensation to be back in the warmth of the plane that we pretty much fell straight to sleep and slept all the way back. Once we landed we were all rushed to the medical clinic and checked over thoroughly. Preliminary tests suggest we are all well and we have to go back in a few days once they have the blood sample back to get the all clear. So we are going to spend the next few days collecting ourselves, cleaning all the soot off our equipment and getting a new heating system and tent before hopefully heading back out later on in the week. Apart from the kerosene heaters making life a misery I actually feel a little sad that we had to leave this camp as it was becoming quite homely.

After only 3 days, the inside lining of the dorm tent, resembled a working coal mine and so has now been abandoned and packed away. This has resulted in all of daily life being contained in just the one mess tent, which is buy no means big enough. We therefore have to remove all our day kit out to face the elements in the evening, and bring in our frozen sleeping kit.

The kerosene heater in the mess tent has also started pluming out fumes and soot, albeit at a slightly slower rate, and so we have reduced to having it on to just at meal times. Even within that 30 minute period of having it on everything gets covered in black, making life a very cold, dirty, toxic and miserable! To put it into perspective Charlie, captain of our FSB ship, is an ex Royal Marine and has spent the last 10 seasons in either the Arctic or Antarctic, and is highly experienced in miserable living conditions and right now he says he wouldn’t even send his worst enemy up here as it is now.

The re-supply due in 11 days time will hopefully bring us a better and safe form of heating and hopefully some fabric to make a second skin for the large space station tent, allowing us to discard this ever darkening mess tent also. Currently the space station with its single walled skin and being 3 times the size of these canvas tents would provide absolutely no insulation and so it can currently be used for nothing other than storage. Which leaves the only option for the next 11 days nothing short of just survival.

It is currently well below -40ºC outside (current thermometer does not cope with below -40ºC, will hopefully get a better one at first re-supply) and -20ºC inside and hence why I am enduring the pain of frozen feet (a mixed sensation of no feeling at all with the excruciating return of blood flow) as i write this. Although I am only really putting off the most dreaded task, getting into a frozen sleeping bag only to count down the grim unpleasant hours of the night until morning allows us to walk around again and warm up a degree or 2. I am relieved to say that in this instance I am not suffering on my own and Tark’s and Charlie have also lost their sense of humour!!

The one thing that 2 days ago had left me feeling slightly excited, was the knowledge that with all the billions of people living all of the world, we are currently in the most northerly home in the world! However right now the excitement of such a fact has faded.