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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!

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!)

A note to all viewers, you can leave comments for Ben and Dave to see when they next get back to a “civilised” place. They would love to hear from you!
All you have to do is click on the heading/title of any blog entry and it will reload with a comment space below.
Comments are screened (because of spam issues), so yours may not appear immediately.

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

We are sitting in a hunting cabin in the middle of nowhere. Dave is waging jihad on cold feet.

Yesterday was a remarkable day. We woke up feeling OK after not so warm a night. But we were out there, we were doing alright, we hadn’t been eaten by bears, and best of all the wind was blowing in the right direction!

We took off and started to cruise at 20-25km/h. Our route connected up a series of frozen lakes, large and small. The lake ice, where not covered up by snow was unnervingly clear, a deep blue colour like liquid water. Looking into it was like looking into a fractured blue crystal perfectly clear stretching metres into the deep. Best not to look.

The lake ice was fast and smooth, but connecting the lakes were ridges the locals call eskers, which were littered with exposed rocks. There was no way we could avoid all of them so we just blasted over and through them, waiting to rip another runner off the sled.

Somehow though the sled just bounced off them and on we went. On the hilltops we noticed rock cairns placed by Inuit in prehistoric times to guide the way. They call them Inukshucks.

Crystal blue ice speeding by beneath our sled, Inukshucks to guide the way, it was like experiencing time travel and space travel at the same time. After all the work we put into getting here, it was a gratifying moment.

The wind picked up and the snow built into ridges called sastrugi. Our sled bounced off the sastrugi, sometimes getting airbourne across the bigger bumps. Both Dave and I started to wonder when something was going to break.

After lunch (a frozen, teeth-breaking energy bar), we crossed fresh snowmobile tracks,also following the Inukshucks. We followed. The tracks weaved through valleys and across lakes. Then in the distance Dave saw something move.

Ahead was a small herd of Caribou, like deer in fur coats. Dave started to dive the kite to pick up speed as we chased the Caribou down.

The Caribou saw us and took off. They easily matched our speed and then some.We’d never catch them. We continued on.

I couldn’t believe anythiing could live out here. Apparently they live off lichen. At times the hills can be black with caribou, in fact we heard that down near Churchill there is a herd of half a million.Half a million beasts, all living off lichen scratched from beneath the snow.

By 6 pm we’d covered nearly 100 kilometres! An exellent result over such rough country. We started praying for a hut. We’d seen a few hunting shacks along the way, and in our tired state we saw huts on every hill, which as we got closer would turn into rocks. But one squarish rock stayed square, and as we approached we saw three snowmobiles were parked out front.

We parked the sled and Dave walked in. The people inside heard some scratching outside, and with no snowmobile noise assumed Dave was a bear. Luckily Dave opened the door beofre they could get to their guns.

An Inuit, Manesy was out hunting with his two friends, Joe and Steve. They just couldn’t believe we’d sailed out there and came out to see our machine. Inside, they offered us coffee and raw Caribou liver from a beast they had just shot. We accepted the coffee, and declined the liver.

That’s about all the battery life I have left in this laptop. I’ll write more tomorrow.

Ben

Update from Ben, (via an Asus laptop connected to  Fastwave communications technology)

We’re sitting in our tent, litterally in the middle of nowhere, while the wind and the snow blows and blows outside.

We arrived in Rankin inlet yesterday, and waited nervously at the freight terminal for our gear, which was late. Acommodation in Rankin runs about $300
a night, so the non-arrival of our tent and sleeping bag would be very expensive.

It turned up just before ten at night and we made camp on the edge of town. The next morning we had to re-asssemble the sled, which was like putting an Ikea flat pack entertainment unit together outside in -25. Sometimes we do wonder about it all.

The wind picked up nicely, and we took off. It was an immense relief. The terrain was lakes and low rolling hills. The sled performed beautifully.

This part of Canada is called the barrens. It’s the coldest, most windswept place, possibly in all the Americas. It really is tough country. We had a few dramas where our quick release safety shackles on our kites released early , bringing the whole show to a stop. While we sorted it out I looked around and looked forward to getting moving again. It’s a serious place and not somewhere you’d like to get stuck. But then the kite launched again, and off we went. after five hours we covered 45km, which is a nice start, but I know we can do better. We’re off to Baker Lake, the only inland Inuit settlement in the world. Inuit are by and large coastal people, but the Barrens has huge herds of caribou which has suppots a distinct group of Inuit.

About 150km to go. Hope the wind holds out. If not then it’s back to Rankin inlet for us! Wish us luck.

Ben

Just got a Sat phone message from the team, All is well, very well as a matter of fact! They were camped 40km NW of Rankin inlet on their way to Baker lake, which is 420 km inland from Hudson bay, Ben said the sled was working as advertised and it was -30 degrees (not including wind chill). The terrain was offering reasonable travel, though it’s not exactly ice-cap smooth!

It’s a clear and windless day here in Churchill, which is a rare thing. It’s stormed for the past three days. The dog-sledders have all returned after their race was called off midway. Officials judged the conditions too harsh which was a subject of controversy among locals, a sign of creeping softness.

Dave and I got back to town on Monday, and started looking for a way to get further north. We went out to the Calm Air office to get quote for a flight to Rankin Inlet, a town about 600km north of here. We told them what we’re doing, and the next day they offered to fly us up, for free. It’s this kind of generosity that’s marked our visit here. Locals seem to like it that we’re heading out into the wilderness and trying something new. It still feels very much like a frontier here, and that frontier mentality survives. The wilderness is given a respect that borders on fear, but it’s also a subject of immense pride.

The towns on Hudson Bay, like in Greenland, have no roads going in or out. In Churchill, the edge of the waterfront park has a sign saying don’t go any further without a gun, for risk of being eaten by a Polar Bear. You can fly to other towns, or you can take a dangerous and unpredictable journey overland across the sea ice, which it seems here is largely done only by Inuit. So life in town is quite isolated and quite confined. Two Australians heading out onto the ice with their home-made machine seems to please people.

Dave is pacing around our hotel, frustrated. The hardware store is shut for lunch. He’s modifying the steering system on our sled, hopefully to prevent the kind of accident we had last Friday. A steering linkage popped out in the rough ice causing us to veer off into an even bigger bit of ice, ripping off one of the runners. That’s our official Air Safety Investigation finding. We think we can prevent the linkage popping off but we can’t prevent the rough sea ice.

We are taking other measures, lightening our sleds by leaving behind a few luxury items, including our second sleeping bags for super-cold nights. The idea is that less weight means less need to power up our kites so much and risk smashing our way through rough ground. But our best hope is to avoid bad ice all together. Starting further north where we can travel on land should help.

But even then we’re working on nothing more than an informed guess. No-one’s ever kited this coast before. There’s no-one to ring in Rankin Inlet to ask if the terrain suits a Mark 6 Kitesled. The only way to find out is to go there and find out. It involves inherent risk, but it also opens up the possibility of travelling new ground in a new way which is the prize of an adventure like this.

News from the team: Challenges!

Ben: Dave and I are sitting in a hut outside Churchill. Dave is munching on a biscuit and reading a book called “In the Land of White Death” which is about some Russians having a terrible time on polar sea ice a hundred years ago.

We sailed our sled out into thick pressure ice today, where the tides and currents pile the ice up into waves and blocks. Churchill is surrounded by pressure ice and we were trying to get through it in the hope of better conditions on the other side. We travelled about a kilometre before we got the sled sideways at speed and damaged a runner. (The sled is built really tough, but the ice conditions are just atrocious here) We tried skiing though it and it was even worse than on the sled. We were not keen to make any damage worse so it was “game over” for the day and now we’re back in camp.

The problem we’ve got is that the area surrounding Churchill is too rough for kiting, this part of the bay gets 5 metre tides, which means the ice gets lifted up and down nearly the height of a two story building every day and that just wrecks it. We’re the only people to ever come kiting here as far as we know, so we may be paying the price for being the first.

We’d be able to get off the ice and travel on land if we can get a hundred kilometres north, where the boreal forest runs out and the tundra begins. (Kites and trees are a terrible combination, ask Charlie Brown)

Our current plan is to work on heading north above the tree line. Hopefully there the land is smooth and we can make some distance.

Dave: Yes, a steep learning curve today, and I got some new perspectives on the 2008 trip. It now seems that the sea-ice that Pat and I got last year on James Bay was extremely good, when compared to the rest of Hudson Bay. Smaller tides, and a smaller mass of ice, means that the ice down there is subject to much less movement and therefore stays much flatter.  The irony of it is that if we hadn’t had the car crash, then we may not have even made it to James Bay, because we would have flown another thousand kilometres north and perhaps been bogged down in the same ugly pack ice we’ve got up here. Antarctica would be a cinch compared to this!

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