We’re now at N81?49’46”, E105?49’22”, after drifting strongly in a southeasterly direction last night. This morning we woke up 921 km from the North Pole, effectively losing two days. But we pressed on and progressed 10 km today – and that’s very good considering that we drifted 5 km or so in the opposite direction.
You might wonder if there is any point in walking when we’re drifting so much. The thing is, we have to put every kilometre behind us, and each kilometre is equally important. But the conditions here are hardly normal, and sooner or later the ice has to drift towards the north again.
The first two hours this morning were really tough, but gradually the areas of impossible block ice gave way to really excellent skiing. The temperature was comfortable, only 15 degrees below. We measured the thickness of the ice to be 80 cm. It’s a great advantage that it’s solid, because that means less movements and less screw ice or block ice. We’re hoping that we have put most of the thin ice behind us.
Today we witnessed quite a phenomenon, a zone with powerful movement of the ice. A large ice floe had split, and the one on the opposite side of the lead was moving at a tempo that I had never seen before! I timed it – it in just two seconds it moved a whole metre. It was like watching a train go by! We put our suits on and got ready to swim. Then a new ice floe drifted past a little bit slower – and we jumped onto it. In situations like this, we each have 12 m or so of rope so we can move more freely, and then we pulled the pulks after us.
We’ve used the waterproof suits four or five times today, mostly for narrow leads where we swam to be on the safe side. At the end of the day we came to a huge lead – but our luck was even bigger! Suddenly an ice floe came drifting like a bridge into the lead and we got on. Instead of swimming 300 metres we only had to do 15 metres.
Mike and I hope we’ve put the worst areas of moving ice behind us, and that conditions will improve as we move on. Our problem now is the drift, and we have no idea when it’ll turn. But everything else is functioning perfectly, our equipment, techniques and routines are working out exactly as we planned. The only thing we can do is to persevere.
We walked 10 hours today to make up for the short day yesterday.
