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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…..

A quick message from Ben:

 We didn’t find our “salt flats” distance testing ground here, just way too rugged for that. We are however starting to get our heads round how this place works, following hunters waypoints etc. We did 80km in 3 1/2 hours yesterday down to Whale Cove from where I’m writing now.

That’s a pretty good time for bumpy terrain, at that speed it equates to about 500km in 24hrs. Imagine how far they could go if the ground wasn’t so rough!

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!

PICTURES FROM CURRENT EXPEDITION:
More to come soon! 

Ben checked in from the ice. All is well. They are now only 40km from Rankin inlet!
His message spoke of frustrating weather conditions that swung between calm and blizzards, frustrated and tired, they have been putting in some big days on the trail - and they have made good ground, but have had little time or inclination to charge Laptop batteries.

The Stark Landscape is beautiful, the animal life is abundant and the lunches are teeth-shattering.

Text from the team: Hipatbecalmed63d43.467N93d46.712Wnotfar!willcall10minsforwx

Dave soon called with the news that they have been becalmed for two days, only covering 10-15km each day. They were in good spirits and spoke of being visited by a pack of Arctic wolves - animals so large they left paw prints the size of a mans hand.

They were cheered to hear that a light Northerly wind is forecast for the next 24hrs, but, by the look of the weather chart below, they may not be covering any huge distances in the near future!

I read some of the comments on the blog which gave them a great stoke!

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