by Chris Bray
Eventually we grounded and I stumbled clumsily out, staggering in the buffeting wind and rain until I finally gained my balance and went to join Clark with the lunch things. ‘There’s no way we can paddle in this,’ I groaned.
‘And there’s no way we can camp on this,’ Clark added gloomily, looking around the tidal mudflat on which we were marooned. We tried hauling, but we almost threw up with the exertion, and we didn’t have a point to aim for, anyway.
Fumbling with another nut ration we wandered aimlessly ahead looking for somewhere dry enough to camp, and somewhere to collect some water. We found several small pools, but all were disgustingly salty. At last, 1 kilometre on, we found a small dry gravel patch. ‘I guess we’d better go back and get the PACs then …’ We turned and mechanically staggered towards our distant PACs, shackled up and hauled them back along the imprint of our earlier muddy footsteps, passing wolf tracks everywhere.
Having finally dragged them both there, we sank to the ground. ‘Oh, no,’ Clark put a hand to his head, ‘we still need water …’ Binoculars revealed what looked like slightly higher ground (less salty water?) way off in the opposite direction, so we grabbed our water bladders and a saucepan to fill from, and walked wearily towards it.
Eventually we came upon a large but rather stagnant-looking pond, full of whirling critters. ‘Still pretty salty,’ I said, spitting it out, ‘but it’ll have to do.’ It was crazy—the wind was now so strong that when I tried to pour the water from the saucepan into the mouth of the bladder, the stream of water just got whipped away horizontally and dissolved into a fine spray. I tried to turn my back to the wind to create some shelter, but the whirling air around me now caused the water to pour upwards right into my face! Eventually we filled the bladders and squelched back to our PACs, each carrying what looked disconcertingly like the kind of clear plastic bag people carry home from the pet shop, ready to start an aquarium—it had that many little bugs and whirligigs swimming around in it. ‘Yum!’ I laughed. ‘Extra protein!’
It was a real battle to get the tent up—the howling wind trying to rip it out of our hands as we slid the poles in and nailed it into the ground with every tent peg we had. As soon as it was up, we both clambered inside, slipped straight into our sleeping bags and blocked out the world with Vivaldi and a hot chocolate at first, and then with alfredo pasta. ‘What a day,’ Clark mumbled. ‘I’m totally shattered.’ Today was, as Clark commented, definitely ‘one of those days you wouldn’t wish upon your worst enemies, but glad you’ve experienced it yourself and survived’, to use as a yardstick in the future when days seem ‘hard’ …
DAY 31: Stuck in the mud
I woke early and lay there, feeling the howling wind buffeting the tent as sheets of rain pelted noisily against the fabric. My wind-speed watch showed a steady 49 kilometres per hour, and in the distance the fiord was a seething body of churning white water. With nothing but sloppy mud to haul over, it seems we’re pinned here for the day.
After brekky we busied ourselves with random tasks, filling the time between food breaks. ‘My heartbeat’s 41 bpm!’ I announced proudly. It was 61 bpm when we left home.
Opening the zipper into the vestibule on his side of the tent, Clark said suddenly, ‘There’s a bird in here—look!’ Sure enough, wedged tightly in between our warm inner-tent, our camera bag, and our detergent bottle cringed a small sandpiper bird.
‘It must be sheltering from the storm,’ I said in astonishment, as the tiny bird blinked up at us, making no effort to escape. ‘You know your tent’s good when wild animals prefer it to their own natural shelter!’ I laughed. ‘Or goes to show how bad the storm is …’
I rugged up and went for a walk to collect some water at 5 pm. ‘It’s 1.5 degrees Celsius out here!’ I shouted above the wind. My fingers had never felt so cold before—it felt like they had been frozen inside a block of ice, and then suddenly run under hot water while being struck repeatedly with a mallet. On my way back, I checked the temperature again: minus 0.2 degrees. I dived inside the tent, ripping my gloves off and sticking my hands between my legs in an effort to re-warm them.
‘Here it comes,’ Clark said, grinning, ‘the Arctic winter!’
DAY 32: Winter approaches
‘Wow! Clark … Check it out!’ I breathed, peering outside. He woke and joined me gazing out over a completely different world. A blanket of snow smothered the tundra, the little ponds nearby had frozen over, and even our water bladders were crispy around the edges. ‘Minus 2.2 degrees,’ I said, tapping the thermometer.
We only have a few more days of paddling along the north-eastern coastline of this eastern flange of the island before we strike inland, and anxious to leave these mudflats behind, we packed up camp and hauled to the shore as snow flurried around us.
‘Have a look, Clark,’ I called him over. There on the ground was one of the little sandpiper birds—just like the one that tried to shelter inside our tent—curled on the tundra, frozen solid. ‘Wow,’ I mumbled, ‘I guess that’s what happens if you don’t migrate south in time.’
Snow goggles wrapped firmly around our balaclavas, drysuit collars lifted well up and hoods pulled well down, we felt impervious to the gale and launched our PACs into the angry, breaking water. It was quite the experience, paddling into an Arctic gale, the wind thick with snow, paddling past icebergs as the odd icy wave exploded against the bow. So long as we kept paddling hard, we stayed warm. The moment we stopped—for nut breaks or lunch—our core temperatures dropped and, shivering uncontrollably, we’d have to cut it short and keep paddling.
Spotting an ideal dry campsite at about 5 pm, we pulled in to shore, set up the tent and piled inside. ‘It’s so quiet and warm in here,’ I whispered, wrapping my agonisingly frozen fingers around a particularly rich hot chocolate,
‘Cheers, mate!’ Clark said, clinking his mug to mine. ‘Happy halfway day! Halfway to 65 days!’ We only have to survive what we’ve already endured again, and then we’ll be home! It’s a wonderful thought, but the now sub-zero temperatures hint that we are in for some hard times ahead.
Pouring an extra hot drink and dividing up our instant just-add-water ‘dark chocolate cheesecake’ that we brought for this very moment, we spent a pleasant evening reading a swag of lovely emails and website messages while intermittently noting the temperature outside, which was once again plummeting: 0.1, 0.0, minus 0.1, minus 0.2, minus 0.6, minus 1.2.
DAY 33: Frost-nipped fingers
At minus 2.2 degrees, it became a challenge to do almost anything this morning. After shaking snow off our drysuits we changed into them, and then wedged our already painfully cold feet inside the deformed, frozen solid wetsuit booties—like zipping our feet into a shoe-shaped chest-freezer.
But this trauma was nothing compared to donning our gloves. As usual they were waterlogged after paddling yesterday, and we’d simply left them in the PACs, where they had now frozen absolutely solid. Prising mine out of the cockpit, I had to repeatedly thrash them against the tyres to smash the ice inside them enough to wedge my fingers in.
At first they just felt f*&king cold, and we actually grinned at each other, laughing at the discomfort of it all, but then as we pushed our PACs down to the water’s edge, my smile slid away as my fingers reached a level of pain I’ve never experienced before—my fingers by this stage totally senseless, as if made of plastic. I put them between my legs desperately trying to warm them up, I whirled them around and around trying to force blood-flow back into them, all the while in the most excruciating pain I’ve ever had to endure. It was all I could do to make little noises behind my balaclava and grit my teeth so as not to cry out. I thought that maybe the shards of ice inside had somehow totally sliced up my fingers, and I ripped my gloves off expecting blood, but no, it was just the nerves in my fingers screaming out that they were dying. Ten hours later they are still burning, and look slightly blistered! Scary, considering it was only minus 2 degrees Celsius.
Paddling out into in
cessantly slamming waves eventually got the blood flowing again, and after a few hours of giving it my all, I called out to Clark. ‘I don’t think we’re actually moving anymore! Let’s head for that hunk of ice on the shore over there!’ It was about 150 metres ahead, and we powered towards it. A good 15–20 minutes later it was still no closer. Defeated yet again, we swung broadside and headed for shore.
Unable to spread the butter even with our fingers, our lunch consisted of fragments of butter and toffee-like peanut butter on flat breads, dusted with snow. A quick GPS check revealed we’d only come 900 metres all day. ‘What?’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s bullshit!’
It was a real psychological blow. ‘We’re never going to get out of this place,’ Clark groaned. Unable to kayak, unable to camp, we accepted our fate and shackled up. Broken men, we toiled through the boot-sucking mud, head down in our own little world of suffering, no longer caring enough to walk around ponds of water or aim for slightly drier ground. Just one foot splashing, squelching in front of the other, slowly forcing each leg muscle to straighten in turn, thus dragging the PAC forward, one step at a time. It was soul destroying.
I called my parents tonight to wish them a happy anniversary. As soon as Mum realised it was me, she started crying and asked me to come back early! ‘Are you warm enough?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes,’ I lied, cradling the sat phone in my throbbing hands.
Dad had some good news. ‘The weather forecast for Cambridge Bay shows it warming back up tomorrow …’ Please let it be true. Please let this only be a passing cold front, and not the beginning of the end.
DAY 34 (1 September 2005): Perfect paddling
The temperature read a balmy 2.2 degrees outside. ‘Now’s our chance!’ I said to Clark as we enjoyed oats and coffee. ‘Let’s paddle as far as we can today, and get past all this coastal mud!’
Although it was still overcast and we were padding directly into a headwind and current, it was nothing like yesterday, and we made good progress. The current racing past the larger grounded bergs actually kicked up a bow wave, and it sometimes looked like they were charging ahead.
After lunch, a seal popped its head up in the distance and regarded us, before withdrawing back under the surface. We paddled on, and every few moments, the seal would surface, closer and closer. I stopped paddling, and slid to a halt. A huge dark form passed underneath my PAC, and then suddenly the large round face of a bearded seal poked up right beside me, staring at me with curious black eyes, while I stared back, equally amazed.
We had to keep going, but to our delight the seal followed us for almost half an hour, during which time the weather eased, and then, seemed to literally ‘turn off’. Without a ripple disturbing the crystal-clear water, and with the stones on the bottom sliding past well below, it really looked as if we were suspended in mid air, paddling through space past hovering chunks of ice, each sculpted into beautiful mushrooms and flutes—some white and some pale blue with cracks revealing an iridescent, electric-blue interior. A single delicate feather rested curled upon the surface of the water as I paddled past, and small, transparent lumps of ice occasionally clunked against the bow and gently tumbled their way down the length of the hull.
‘Isn’t this just … magic!’ Clark had silently slipped alongside. We ceased paddling for a while and spun gradually around in space, taking it in. I was listening to some tranquil Inuit music at the time, and the whole experience blossomed into an almost surreal dream.
Pulling into shore for the evening, I discovered quite a lot of water in my PAC. ‘I think my PAC’s got a hole in it somewhere, guv,’ I noted to Clark, but not even this could dent our morale tonight.
DAY 35: The ice maze
It was actually warm in the tent this morning! Four degrees Celsius outside, quickly rising to 7 degrees as we examined our maps and decided to head for a river inlet 8 kilometres up the coast. ‘Yeah, that looks like a good place to strike inland,’ Clark agreed, ‘Let’s go for it!’
As we packed up camp, sunlight suddenly burst through the thinning clouds. ‘The sun!’ I shouted—our first glimpse for almost a week.
It was brilliant paddling today and our solar panels greedily lapped up the sunshine. The wind and the current were now in our favour, and we tore along, past still more miraculously carved icebergs, some overhung, some forming impressive archways and tunnels, and others convoluted underwater forms. It was just beautiful, pausing occasionally to eat some nuts as the PACs spun silently, then effortlessly gliding ever onwards.
I suddenly noticed, late afternoon, that we were not so much ‘paddling past’ hunks of ice anymore, but rather threading our way around and in between them. ‘It’s turning into a bit of a maze, hey!’ I shouted over to Clark.
We proceeded for another half an hour or so, as the gaps between bergs became so narrow that our PAC wheels started scraping along the sides—shaving off ice as we squeezed through. The once blissful silence was now filled with the continual groaning, squealing, crunching and splashing of shifting masses of ice around us. Increasingly we became jammed and had to back up and nose into a different opening in the labyrinth. ‘This is getting a bit dodgy actually,’ I called, fending off from another towering wall of ice. ‘It’s going to get dark in a few hours …’
It was a sobering thought. Over a kilometre from shore amongst shifting ice, with nowhere to set our tent or tripwire—in fact, nowhere even to get out of our PACs. And, my PAC was starting to feel particularly sluggish and heavy, gradually leaking and sinking beneath me. ‘Let’s head back out,’ I pressed, ‘and follow the shore instead.’ Clark agreed and, pushing off with our paddles from the ice that now virtually surrounded us, we manoeuvred our PACs around 180 degrees. The ice looked just as impenetrable behind us. Visions of Shackleton’s Endurance disaster flashing before my eyes, I headed for a gap, paddled hard and slid up and over a shallow sheet of submerged ice and slipped back into the water on the far side, swerving to avoid another wall of ice.
We eventually wound our way back out of the maze, and headed for shore where we found a narrow ice-free passage and followed that up the coast. Nearing the river mouth, the muddy terrain at last gave way to genuine tundra and stones, a convenient haul-out point on the shore.
Thrilled to be back on solid, dry land, Clark picked up a spiral fossil, and then crouched down to look at a small plant. ‘So many things to look at!’ he said excitedly. It was sensory overload after the endless oozing brown mud and the silent water.
‘Over here!’ I called, ‘I just found a whale skull!’ Surrounded by scattered vertebrae, it looked like the skull of a beluga, the Arctic’s famous ‘white whale’.
‘Hey! Back off!’ Clark suddenly shouted behind me, and turning, I saw him running at a large, ungainly bird that was attacking the zipper tassle on our camera bag. ‘Don’t touch what you can’t afford!’ It looked like a young glaucous gull, and it couldn’t have cared less about Clark comically flapping around trying to scare it off.
I scooped up and tasted some water from a pond at my feet—it was the purest, most unsalty water I’d tasted all week. ‘This is an amazing place!’ I grinned, feeling all my pent-up worry and stress from the last few days draining out of me. ‘Let’s take the day off tomorrow and explore!’
DAY 36: A well-earned break
We woke at 9 am to a blissfully sunny day, and an unusual sensation. ‘It’s almost hot!’ Clark commented, reaching for the thermometer. ‘Wow! Ten degrees!’ We made the most of our rest day today: charging batteries, filming and photographing various things on our lists including shots for sponsors, writing a website update and even loading some essentials into our camera bag and going for a wander inland, carrying both a shotgun and fishing rod.
‘I thought Victoria Island was supposed to be teeming with char,’ I frowned in frustration, casting again into a snaking river. ‘It’s rice night again tonight, too … come on, just one fish?’
Just before dinner, I happened upon a lemming. ‘Cl
ark—come and look!’ Suddenly feeling vulnerable, the little rodent scurried towards me and wedged itself between my boots.
‘That’s so adorable,’ Clark laughed. Every time I lifted my foot to try and walk away, it scampered directly beneath my lowering shoe as a place to hide. Not the brightest of animals …
DAY 37: At last, we’ve seen the light!
Revitalised after yesterday’s break, we rose early, packed up, clipped ourselves back into our hauling harnesses and heaved our PACs into motion. ‘It feels good to be hauling again,’ I said, genuinely. After a week of either paddling or soul-destroying double-hauling through thick mud, it was great to be lurching independently over reasonable tundra.