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.

As for the Ice Team, we know very little on their progress, other than the small bar of ‘Hotel Chocolate’ I bought Pen for his birthday, thinking I was being very thoughtful and organised to plan for such things back in England, has today caused him to chip his tooth…opps!!