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!