We have made it out of South Camp Inn, yippeeeee, and we are once again surrounded by breathtaking beauty and not  another human being for hundreds of miles, perfect.

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!

I am very pleased and proud to tell you that all the hard work that went into ‘The Great Walk of China’ has started paying off and it has recently been shortlisted, along with 3 other films for ‘best independent film 2009’ at the Media Innovation Awards. Incidentally thank you so much to everybody who has been sending us such great feed back and I am sorry I haven’t been able to reply to all of you individually.

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.