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Canada 2009 was a make or break trip. After five expeditions in as many years, we’d turned an improbable concept into a series of extraordinary machines, but behind the scenes, there was race between our Antarctic dreams and impending parenthood (at least for Pat and I … Dave looked on with amusement.)

We needed a strong result in Canada, with big distances and solid reliability if we were to take our machines to Antarctica. But on this trip, we didn’t get it - the conditions were not favourable, and our set-up still imperfect. Stretched out before us was a long road of painstaking development and many more journeys from Sydney to the Arctic.

After the birth of my daughter Inez, and Pat’s daughter Daisy, we no longer had the time nor money to dedicate to the Kitesled project, so we’ve decided to call it quits. The project is still bubbling away in our heads, but let’s just say we’ve placed it to the back burner for now.

One of my personal goals in this project was to have more fun than humanly possible, and in this respect Kitesled has been hugely successful. It was a chance to work on something truly new, and in a world where it can seem at times that all the great adventures have already been done, finding an untravelled road has been enormously rewarding. Along the way I’ve made some special friends and seen some of the rarest parts of the world.

We only got as far as we did with the continued support of the Peter Lynn kite community and many businesses and individuals in Australia and around the world. Particular thanks go to:
Peter and Elwyn Lynn for their generosity over many years;
Craig Hansen and Jenny Cook in Ashburton;
Pete Lynn in San Francisco;
Lachlan Bede from Kiteworks in Newcastle;
Mike Richards from Kite Magic in Coogee and Steve McCormack at Kitepower in Sans Souci.

Special thanks to Australian Geographic and Paddy Pallin for their support over several expeditions, and thank you to the many other businesses that have supplied us with goods and services at little or no charge. You’ve all made our journeys possible.

So what next??
Dave’s spending long hours on an invention that Pat and I are hoping will soon make him a very wealthy and generous man.
Pat’s just landed a plum job at an environmental education centre in Sydney and has perfected the 24 hour Sydney to the snow and back Kiteskiing trip.
I’ve just bought a yacht that I’m turning into a floating crèche with plans for a trip around Oz or beyond.

Various sleds have now taken their rightful places in the backyard among the long grass, under the house, and tucked away in Dave’s shed waiting to be cannibalised for some future invention.

Fair winds!

Ben Deacon

October 2009

More to come when Dave gets home, he’s currently kitesurfing in the straits of Gibraltar!

Friends back home have asked me what local people made of us, and how they reacted when we told them we were from Australia. Well, several times the reaction was identical - two words - “Crocodile Dundee!!”.

Crocodile Dundee is huge in Nunavut. It seems everyone has seen the film, and loves it. We were first asked about it by a disabled boy in Rankin inlet Pizza Hut. He wanted us to pass on his address to Dundee, and didn’t want to know that he was actually an actor with tax problems who lived in LA. Solomon too was a huge fan, and did an enthusiastic “That’s not a knife” impersonation while we hunted seal. He said once when he came face to face with a Muskox, notorious for charging when threatened, he remembered the way Dundee hypnotized a water buffalo in the film, and thought he’d give it a try. Apparently the technique didn’t translate.

I guess the story of a clever hunter who outwits the city folk resonates out here. Solomon did say if it’s scheduled on Satellite TV, all the hunters will come in from the hills to catch it.

Last time we posted we had three days to sail 240 kilometres, pack all our gear and make a flight to Winnipeg to make my flight back to Australia, and the forecast was weak. Ten knot northerlies getting lighter the further south we sailed. Still, fortune favours the brave, so at dawn we tried to ignore flags flapping feebly as we dragged our sleds through Whale Cove.

Our kites launched OK, and we headed off, the hamlet receding from view as we exited the bay Whale Cove is named for, and headed south. The difference in temperature in the month we’d been in the north was remarkable. In Churchill at the start of the trip, it was minus thirty in the mornings, and now it was only minus fifteen degrees, which felt a world of cold away. The temperature was bordering on…pleasant… or maybe after a few weeks of blizzards and nights huddling in sleeping bags, we’d become acclimatised. The Arctic definitely didn’t feel as threatening as it did on our arrival. It’s always the way, just as you get used to a place, it’s time to go home.

But some more power would have been nice. The fact is we were crawling along. So we stopped to put up some bigger kites. Or try to. But as the wind dropped a few critical knots, nothing would launch. Becalmed. Again.

Our fairytale ending was slipping from our grasp. To be more precise, time was slipping from our grasp. Readers old enough to have grown up on arcade video games will remember the sinking feeling of running out of extra time on your last twenty cent piece.

As we sat on our sleds, waiting for the wind to return, postponing the walk back to town, we saw a snowmobile approach. It was Solomon.

“My wife’s been watching you guys out the kitchen window. She says you haven’t moved in a while so she sent me out.”

In some ways it was a fitting end to our expedition, Solomon’s wife chain-smoking, watching us through binoculars out her kitchen window. Our adventure at the edge of the world took place in their backyard.

Back in Whale Cove, flights were arranged, again with the extraordinary generosity and support of Calm Air. Back in Winnipeg, spring had long since arrived, and the snow was gone. I was off home to my wife and daughter, and Dave was off to Spain.

Attentive readers may have noticed our hopes of big distances on this trip disappeared among the broken ice and shifting winds of Hudson Bay. This time last year, Dave and Pat travelled 500km in a week, with Dave nursing seven broken ribs. In retrospect, Dave said, James Bay was Kitesled Paradise, flat and fast with consistent winds. The five metre tides of northwest Hudson Bay made those kind of distances impossible. But the very obstacles we faced made this corner of the arctic such a fascinating place to travel.

There is a tradition among modern adventurers to seek out uninhabited regions, one that I’ve pursued in journeys to Greenland. But northwest Hudson Bay is filled with people going about their lives in conditions every bit as harsh as those faced by even Antarctic adventurers.

Mixing wilderness adventure, invention and meeting local people made for a unique type of adventure I found enormously rewarding. I hope adventurers can build on our work and create some great journeys across this very interesting part of the world.

I’d never slept on an eight thousand dollar couch before. Our friend Steve who we met in one of the hunting cabins picked us up from Harry’s. He and his fiance Deanna offered us beds for the night. They’d just refurnished their house, including a new couch they’d bought in Winnipeg, a thousand miles to the south. When they missed freighting it up on the last ship of the year, they flew it up at a cost of five and a half thousand dollars. Whatever the price, it was better than a tent.

We got up early, to take advantage of fresh northerly winds. We planned to head to Whale Cove, a hamlet of 300 people 80 kilometres to the south. Our sleds were on the wrong side of town, a problem fixed by Steve, who tied them to the digger on his giant earthmoving machine and towed us across town to our start point. The sight cracked the locals up as they watched us slide by.

In contrast to Churchill, the sea ice between Rankin Inlet and Whale Cove was fast and smooth. Finally we found the kind of surface we’d hoped for, and we shot down the coast, stopping to talk to a few snowmobilers heading up to Rankin. Three and a half hours later we put our kites down on the outside of town and hauled our sleds in, with an increasing entourage of small children.

Whale Cove was sleepy and small. Huddled amongst the rocks, it mixed northern fishing village with the laid-back feel of a polynesian village. Dogs lay in the snow. Bits of snowmobile sat in piles next to bits of frozen Caribou and Muskoxen.

As usual, Dave and I sat down and waited to see what was going to happen next. A ute pulled up. Out hopped a middle-aged Inuk with one tooth, grinning and jumping around like a young boy. Solomon was his name. He asked us where we’d come from and where our snowmobile was. We’d come from Rankin, we said, and we didn’t have a snowmobile. Dave explained we’d come by kite, waving his hand through the air in a universally cryptic gesture signifying “kite”. Solomon looked at both of us, sizing us up, then burst out laughing.

“Whooh boy, you glided down here? how long did that take?”

“About three and a half hours.”

“That’s almost as fast as my wife!”

Dave later got to ride a snowmobile with Solomon’s chain-smoking, sixty year old wife, an experience he described as “terrifying”…

more to come…..

We’re tired, we stink, and we’re holed up back where we began a fortnight ago, in Rankin Inlet Pizza Hut. I shouldn’t be surprised, but it does feel strange to see the western world re-created here in such perfect detail. Supermarket culture is so convenient and so abundant, and the local Inuit of course have taken to it with great enthusiasm. 

He wrote this unforgettable description of seal hunting:

“As soon as all was in readiness, Inugtuk spread out

his bag on the snow in front of the hole and stood on

it. This partly to prevent the snow from creaking

underfoot, and partly as a protection from the cold.

And there he stood, like a statue harpoon at the

ready…

“Hour after hour passed, and I began to

realize what an immense amount of patience and

endurance are required for this form of hunting with

the thermometer at minus 50 degrees. Four hours of it

seemed to me an eternity, but there are men who have 

stood for 12 hours on end, in hope of bringing food back

for the hungry ones at home…”

“Our total bag that day was one seal, and fifteen

men were out for eleven hours to get it. But my

comrades were only too thankful that they had anything

to bring home at all.”

Dave and I cruised the aisles of the Northern Mart supermarket, looking for cheap socks and t-shirts to wear once we found somewhere to have a shower. A lot of the items on the shelves were factory seconds. Dave said he’d seen the same thing in the Pacific, where defective goods were dumped on a captive market.
 

Dave continues the story from where Ben left off….

So, we were becalmed 150km into the middle of arctic tundra, surrounded by wolves, and, as it turned out, running out of food. We’d left Rankin Inlet on a 2-3 day run to Baker Lake with food for roughly 12 days, but that was 7 days ago and we where currently going nowhere, very slowly, under a clear blue sky, with no signs of any wind at all. This presented us with 3 options:

1. Wait (eating as little as possible) for northerly wind, and head back to Rankin, staying put during southerly winds (N winds being allegedly predominant here).

2. Vice versa heading for Baker Lake (Noting that S winds had dominated the last week).

3. Attempt to man haul 150km either N or S (Depending on our best guess of which wind might assist us most), and burn about 3 times the calories of options 1 and 2.

We put off the decision till morning and shared a de-hydrated meal between us.

We awoke to clear still skies again, yet I was reminded of a moment in Captain Cook’s journals, when his ship was being inexorably drawn onto reefs in a dead calm, and he writes something like,

“…then a wind arose, that was so faint that we would not have noticed it at any other time.”

We hastily struck camp, and added double length lines on our kites, hoping to catch a few more knots of breeze higher up. It took ages to get both kites up, where even on the long lines, they pulled very weakly. We made a miserable 200m for our efforts. Oh well, exploring on foot, and sunbaking for the afternoon.
A satphone call to Pat informed us that NW wind was due overnight, so we resolved to get an early night, and rise with the wind, travelling in the dark if necessary.

In the morning we where under way, slowly at first, reversing our path through the labyrinth of frozen rivers and lakes. It was good to be moving again.
About lunchtime we came across a tiny cabin with 3 snowmobiles outside, and 3 Inuit watching (and videoing) our approach. We were warmly invited inside, where clear chunks of ice, freshly cut from the lake, melted in a teapot. John and his two nephews were out hunting for the weekend, and had spotted us earlier that morning, fascinated, they told us, by what they thought where huge birds or aircraft behaving strangely in the distance.

As we sipped our tea, and after the standard questions: Have you seen wolves, caribou, musk ox? tracks? going where? we got onto John’s childhood. He had been born in an igloo in the 50s, on a remote piece of coastline near Cambridge Bay. His mother gave birth to 8 children, in igloos, with only her husband helping. They continued living a semi-nomadic life until John was 12, following the Caribou, building fresh igloos each time they moved on. John proudly remembers his first kill, aged 10, when he shot a Caribou for his family while his father was away in hospital.

A topic that always seems to come up when we meet hunters, other than where the game is, is clothing. These guys all sport an impressive range of fur, with seal, beaver, wolf, and polar bear being popular for mitts, and wolf, wolverine, and dog being the usual choice for ruff. Caribou sleeping bags (fur side in) are apparently still in use. Modern light weight gear like ours is viewed with some wariness, and there is considerable interest in how we stay warm in an unheated tent without fur. Many people like our down jackets, but would all want a zipperless pullover version. Front zippers are very out of fashion up here (are you reading this Mountain Hardware?) because they leak cold air when your doing 80 kmh on your snowmobile.
Oversize gumboots seem to be the footwear of choice, preferably white, worn with thick knee-length felt liners. This thoroughly cool look is accessorised by a motley collection of old rifles. One I saw looked WW1 vintage, fitted with modern telescopic sights.
Ben and I are planning to be the talk of the Sydney fashion scene this winter with “Eskimo Chic”.

After our tea, the old Coleman stove was packed away onto a Komatik (sled towed by snowmobile) and the hunters sped off. We caught up to them a few miles further on, as they stopped to investigate a wolverine den, and a few miles after that after John had shot a wolverine. He said the fur was worth up to $800.

At 9pm we were still making good ground. As the sunset had almost completely faded in the south, we started to notice, like slow motion underwater effects, iridescent green cascades in the northern sky . The northern lights entertained us for a full hour with their mysterious pulsating. We stopped to pitch the tent at 10pm, having totalled about 11 hours of skiing that day, covering 110km, and felt sufficiently confident to go back onto full rations for the night, expecting to make the remaining 40 km into Rankin the following day.

To our immense frustration, we awoke to a blizzard from the south, re-instated half rations, and spent the day in a tent slowly being buried by snow and trying not to feel hungry. The blizzard had weakened somewhat to 20 knots the following morning, so we decided to try to make the remaining 40 km by tacking upwind through quite rough terrain.
An exhausting 8 hrs later, we’d made 10 km. Sharing our second last de-hy meal that night, we hoped against hope for a Northerly.

In the end, we arrived back in Rankin the following day on a moderate NW breeze, almost 2 weeks after we’d left, with one de-hy meal, one chocolate bar and some tea bags. As we trudged through the streets of Rankin towards food, we got the sense that word had got around about the two crazy Australians and their kites. Several people said they had seen us leave town and wondered where we had been. Manisee, Steve and John all stopped their pickups to greet us, and all said they had been watching the winds, and looking out for us.

Ben and I had identified early on on this trip that we’re both the type who are little bit glad when things don’t go as planned. We prefer having to deal with new challenges as they come up, rather than simply executing a plan, so, as we sipped our first bad filter coffee, we laughed at how much fun we’d just had, despite how far from the script the trip had gone, and resolved to take on the sea ice in the time we’ve got left…

Since Dave wrote this much more has happened, be sure to keep checking kitesled.com!

Well, I haven’t heard from the team for a couple of days. This is entirely normal for us, for when the going gets tricky we often forget to do things like put the solar panel out to charge the communications gear!

I am so jealous of Ben and Dave’s current adventures that I threw together a short nostalgic video of last years expedition to remind me of other adventurous times….then, inexplicably, I decided to set it to a bluegrass soundtrack. (!)

The result can be viewed below:

(Dave and Ben are covering far rougher terrain than this at present - Fair winds boys!)

It turns out that raw Caribou liver is not as good as the cooked variety, and that niether of these is as good as a Caribou Steak Sandwich, which, when taken in a warm cabin, in the middle of the featureless sub-arctic tundra, and washed down with Rye Whisky, is nothing short of sublime. Add to these culinary delights the conversation topics of snowmobiles, guns, and hunting, and you have the perfect northern bloke’s night in.
Manesy provided a constant source of interest for Ben and I, keen as we were to study the Inuit hunter and his tradititional ways. Before long, the subject of our anthropologial facination produced a satellite phone and called his wife, just to explain that a pair of crazed Australians had shown up at the cabin claiming to have sailed there from Rankin inlet. Our interest was further peaked when he plugged his ipod into some miniture speakers, explaining as he turned up “Funky Town” (by that 70s disco band) that he was a “civilised Eskimo”.
The civilisation of the Inuit was something we had dicovered a few days previously in Rankin Inlet. Despite being 1200km from the nearest road, in a town besieged by ice and acessable only by air 9 months of the year, we had found ourselves in a supermarket indistinguishable from Bondi Junction Coles. As we waited in 25C comfort for our Pizza Hut pizza, I managed to photograph an Inuit family dispensing themselves rasberry and cola Slushies from the frozen drink machine.

Anyway, back at the cabin, the morning after the Caribou feast, Manesy gratified us with a more traditional display of inuit technology by butchering half a frozen Caribou outside in the snow, before loading up his snowmobile and komatik and roaring off with the others. This left Ben and I to inspect the sled and the damage incurred during the previous day’s thrashing over countless razor sharp granite boulders. I’d been dreading this all night. We found the underside in amazingly good condition, utterly scraped and gouged, but still totally sound, however, as I had feared, the main steering post, which bears all the weight of the pilot during high speed collisions with sastrugi (or more specifically, rocks), had snapped. This means that we cant steer, so we decided to return to Rankin Inlet for repairs. unfortunately the wind was against us, se we spent the day lashing the steering straight and breaking the sled down into it’s “plan B” configuration, whereby each half of the sled can be towed individually by a kiteskier. So the 130 km back to Rankin will be on skis, towing half a sled, and half our gear each.

Today the wind was too light to travel, so we slept in, and then tested our new Flysurfer Speed kites, which we hope to use on the trip back to Rankin. They performed brilliantly, and if you’ll excuse some geekery for the kiters reading this, we found we could ski up to 35 degrees off the wind even in 5-8 knots! A big thanks to Trevor Jack of Moreton Bay Kiting for his expert 1.5 conversion to the Speed 13.

So all’s set for a 2-3 day ski back to Rankin in the morning. Tonight I’m cooking blueberry pankakes in some leftover Caribou fat that I found in an old pan lying around the hut. Ben is unsure about this plan, but he’s just jealous because he didnt think of it himself.

Dave

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