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 started this post about 12 hours ago and I am now on my 3rd attempt. My first draft was a real master piece and the computer, having a mind of its own, decided to crash and loose everything. My second attempt turned into a bit of a rant about the fact that I had lost my first post but I was called away to a meeting and by the time I got back the computers battery had died and for some reason, best known to itself the computer failed to save anything. So here I am on my third attempt!!!

I’ve lost track of time up here and all the days seem to blend into one. Yesterday though I got excited for the first time as Chip (the expeditions operations manager) and I flew from Resolute Bay up to Isachsen to drop a fuel cache. The small plane (Twin Otter) that will drop us out on the ice later on the week can’t carry enough fuel on board to go from Resolute Bay to our drop off point on the ice and back again. Consequently we have had to put a makeshift refuelling station about half way. I say about half way because its very difficult to know exactly were we will be put down. Obviously the sea ice is slightly temperamental and so it will be a case of finding a landing strip suitable to put the plane down on in amongst the chaos. Apart from the convenience of being about half way, Isachsen was chosen because between the 1940’s and the 1970’s there was a research facility up there and they built a runway to get all the kit in or out. It was a very surreal experience, with no pun intended the entire station was quite literally frozen in time. After some fast and furious digging we managed to unearth the door to one of the facilities and when we got inside everything was exactly as it was the last time people were there. All the food was still neatly stacked on the shelves, the beds were made, the pens and pads were on the desks and there was even a leg of lamb in the fridge!

In any case the flight was a welcome break from the never ending mountains of kit we are preparing and testing. Why, so

close to departure, are the team still testing equipment you might be asking! Well the answers are simple. The first reason in neither exciting or surprising, it’s money!!! To cut a long story short expeditions don’t run on thin air and for some reason (still unbeknown to me) sponsors always seem to wait until the 11th hour before joining or committing to expeditions. As a consequence buying equipment is left until the 12th hour and with heavy time constraints you often can’t get the exact piece of kit you want and have to modify a similar item to make do. The second reason IS exciting, well it is to me at least, and that is science. Originally expeditions were all bout science and discovery. As technology and knowledge have evolved at an exponential rate over the past century, discovery and scientific endeavours have made way for personal expeditions. Not that their is anything wrong with these trips but a significant void has opened up between expeditionists and scientists. Many believing that our advancements in technology such as satellites have made the relationship superfluous. The truth of the matter being that there is and always will be a close symbiotic relationship between the two. The only problem being that we are no longer simply charting and mapping new areas (or rarely in any case), in order to produce a significant and worthwhile set of data we have to go the extra mile. As such a considerable amount of the equipment that is being used on this trip is firmly in the prototype stages and has been specifically designed for this trip.

Well I think that’s probably enough about my opinions on expeditions and science. Tomorrow we are collecting the final pieces of our kit and all things being equal and pending good weather we are currently looking at a Saturday drop off.

Oh I almost forgot, for some reason the newsletter is not working so I apologies to those who have subscribed and I will try and fix that as soon as possible. The good news is that our widget was accepted by Yahoo and you can now download it on the right. Just click on it and it will do the rest for you. At the moment it acts a bit like an RSS feed and will update automatically every time we update the website. Hopefully I will get it to run all the videos at images soon as well. Any feed back about it is much appreciated!