Got up at 7am. Got some admin done. Went to town at 8:45am with rest of the team to buy more gear. Back by 10:30am. I made a huge brunch partially out of leftovers from previous meals, mainly consisting of pan-fried potato slices a la Art, sausages, bacon, chili a la Stefan, pickles, bread, scrambled eggs. Also simultaneously boiled 1.5kg of potatoes for dinner.
PERMIT FOR HERSCHEL ISLAND
Leven started sorting out the permit for Herschel Island, our finish point. We have agreement in principle to hop onto the island, but still tons of paperwork to fill in.
MORE WORK ON THE BOAT
Got some more work done around the boat. Leven and Art shot more cool videos and had a chat about how to best capture Hermione’s launch tomorrow.
OUR EVER-CHANGING PLAN
The plan is now to launch tomorrow, Saturday, anchor her near the shore, then go on board on Sunday, row to Cambridge Bay, stay there tied to a quay, until the weather improves enough to start our expedition, probably this coming Tuesday or Wednesday. Most of us will probably stay on board during that waiting time. But we do have a room in a local B&B to take a shower or spend the night at.
DOING SOME SHOOTING
Finally got round to doing our shooting practice. I hadn’t shot a gun in 30 years, ever since I had completed my obligatory military service. It felt good holding each of the two guns and shooting it. Neither the shotgun nor the semi-automatic are hard to use. Neither have much recoil.
SOME GUNS JUST NEED A BIT OF FREEZING
The shotgun, which used to jam <a lot> on the first leg (of two) of the expedition last year, seems to have only needed a winter in an unheated shed at up to -50C to sort out its issues. The semi-automatic had a little hiccup that was quickly resolved and worked just fine afterwards.
OTHER BEAR ESSENTIALS
It’s good to know that in addition to the two guns, we have bear spray, a very loud horn, and some flares.
GUN CLEANING
As I had missed out on some of the gun cleaning session last time around, due to kitchen duties, it was my time now to clean both guns under Mike’s & Leven’s supervision.
GOING THROUGH ART’S TRAUMA KIT
Art then spent about 20 minutes walking us through the contents of his expedition trauma kit, a kind of first aid kit on steroids. We also got a chance to test his medical gear. Everyone had healthy results. I aced the heart rate, but the lower value for my blood pressure was a tad high.
A TESTING TIME
I think my current diet of greasy bacon and starchy vegetables with only few greens thrown in, might be to blame. Luckily the “fattening up” diet will stop once on board. There still won’t be any salad, but I’ll start taking the supplements I bought.
BETTER IMPROVE MY DIET
While the food won’t taste great, the expedition rations have been carefully designed to ensure a healthy, balanced diet, with no overkill of greasy stuff. I recently learned that we had gotten rid of the Russian rations of ill repute and instead it’s now mainly reasonably high-end Western dehydrated meals in packs. After the tenth portion of mushy-concoction-inexplicably-called-chicken-stroganof-with-rice we’ll still be fed up with the expedition food, but at least it will be free of the signature flavor combo of chlorine and black mould that is said to come with those ancient Russian rations.
CLIMBING DENALI, WRESTLING ANACONDAS
Going through his medical kit gave Art an opportunity to share a few stories about when the kit had come in handy. Like when he measured his blood oxygen levels on the way to the summit of Denali. In no time we ended up talking about how he learned to deal with a fully grown anaconda. The dangers his expedition on the Amazon River had faced are blood-curdling. Waking up sometimes with tarantulas crawling over your face and body was definitely one of the least worrying aspects.
DINNER
Dinner involved thick slices of ham, a whole roast chicken, more air-cured Arctic char and some pemmican, served with mashed potatoes and bread.
PEMMICAN
I’ve been fascinated by pemmican ever since I first heard about it, a year ago. It is a mixture of tallow and dried game meat. Usually the powdered or crushed bits of dried meat are of elk, moose, deer, bison, caribou. Frequently the meat and lard are mixed with berries, herbs, and spices. Invented by the North Canadian Natives, the food quickly became popular among Western trappers, hunters, and Arctic explorers, because of its long ‘shelf life’ and ultra-high calorie-to-weight/volume ratio.
SURPRISINGLY NON-UNPLEASANT
Having heard many horror stories about its inevitable inedibility (you are pretty much eating almost pure fat), my expectations, despite my fascination ‘in principle’, were extremely low. So it was very much to my surprise that the flavour was neutral, almost vaguely non-unpleasant and somewhat unusual and interesting. I was able to eat 25g of it on its own without any trouble. Surely with some added carbs or a bowl of chicken-stroganof-mash I could easily gobble down ten times as much in one sitting, thus maintaining my vital expedition blubber for insulation purposes.
NOT TOO FISHY
The air-dried char was equally not bad and grew on me. I love the fact that Shawn and his wife Patty Jane catch the fish in huge nets, literally 50m from their house, then kill and fillet it, then air-dry it on the spot for two to three days, then eat or store it.
COOKING DUTIES OVER DISHES
Ever since I found out that you don’t need to do the dishes if you cook, I volunteer for cooking duties. Doing dishes is no fun at the best of times, but with next to no running water it’s even less enticing.
ANYONE IN FOR A DRINK?
The guys had mentioned that they want to visit Cambridge Bay’s only tavern on the only night it is open to the public each week, today, Friday, right after dinner. Fine by me, of course. I enjoy a cold pint as much as the next guy.
TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE
What I hadn’t realised is quite how eager the rest of the team was to get to the bar asap. I was still wiping chicken bones off my face, when I realised everyone else had left. Apparently unbeknownst to me the fine drinking establishment in question closes early, so getting there in a timely manner clearly was of the essence, as any upright chap will assure you.
HAVING A LAUGH
I quickly put on my jacket and boots and went outside. The others had already gotten into the truck. In good humor, of course, with a wink, and just to tease little old me a bit, they switched on the diesel and indicated that I’d have to run if I wanted to make it onto the loading platform of the truck. I pretended to be trying as hard as I could to catch them while they were gently rolling past me at hardly more than walking speed and we all had a good laugh.
FINDING THE DOOR
After a short ride we reached the frontier saloon. At first we tried the wrong door, until we realised that we were at the back of the building and the entrance was on the other end of it.
TALKING OUR WAY IN
The Caucasian landlord then gave us a grilling about who invited us and why we thought we could just rock up and have drinks. In this otherwise almost completely dry town (no alcohol sold, but you can bring alcohol from the next big town, 100s of kilometres away), you need some connections to get into the only watering hole. Fair enough. After several you-are-laughing-you-think-I’m-joking-well-I’m-not-jokings by the Irish lord of the manor, we did manage to talk our way in for a non-member surcharge of $10 per head.
I STILL GOT IT
First thing that happened was that the cheerful kitchen hand, an Inuit lady a good 20 years my senior, started flirting with me, or at least I think that’s what happened. Every time she passed me with a tray or some bottles of condiments she’d give me a huge smile and say something like “I couldn’t even reach your head with my hands” or “I’d like to sit on your shoulders.”
CAN-DO ATTITUDE
We used the coupons we’d been given at the reception to get our first round of tinnies from the counter. Over the course of the evening we sampled Molson (who had organised the Metallica concert in Tuk, back in the day) and another Canadian variety of beer plus the U.S. American Budweiser.
FRANCOIS
After discussing the (nonexisting) pros and (plentiful) cons of using rice in the beer production process (like Bud do), and touching on why Germans call a stein a Krug while English-speaking folk around the world are convinced that stein is the German word for, uhm, stein, we were joined by a young gentleman called François.
IQALUIT-BASED, IN CAMBRIDGE BAY FOR A FEW DAYS
Turned out that he is a self-employed consultant. Six years ago he had moved from his home town Montreal to Iqaluit, the capital city of the Canadian province of Nunavut. It’s this province, in which the whole stretch of the previous year’s leg of the Northwest Passage Expedition and the first bit of this year’s leg have taken respectively will take place. Francois told us that he doesn’t usually get as far west as Cambridge Bay, that he’s only visited here a few times, and that he’s only going to stay for a few days.
MISSING OUT ON MAUD
He told us that we are unlucky in that until three years ago, the wreck of Amundsen’s ship Maud, with which he had unsuccessfully attempted to reach the North Pole, had been floated from its penultimate resting place in Cambridge Bay harbour by the Norwegians and brought back home. Until then, Maud’s mast would stick out of the water and be one of the rare main sights in the settlement.
(c) Jan Wanggaard
FRANKLIN’S EXPEDITION
When François found out that Mike is a direct descendant of Sir John Franklin, he was on fire telling us everything about the attempts to reconstruct the disastrous events from some 175 years ago, when 129 men found their demise in the unforgiving ice. It’s a strange feeling to think that the men died at pretty much the same latitude, a bit further to the East of Cambridge Bay on King William Island.
BETTER LISTEN TO INUIT, INNIT?
François works very closely with the Inuit community and he is convinced that until a generation or two ago, the local communities would have retained all their knowledge of the Franklin expedition, including the precise location of the wrecks of Erebus and Terror. However, with no written Inuit records, with Inuit kids being enrolled in modern schools and the older generations dying of old age, this knowledge got lost forever.
SHRUGGED OFF
There is evidence that some elder tribesmen repeatedly told Western Arctic archaeologists about the exact location of the ships’ remains, only for their advice to be shrugged off and dismissed.
LOOMING ILLUMINATING LOG BOOK DISCOVERIES
It will be fascinating to see what scientists will discover on the shipwrecks, which have now both been located. Ideally, of course, they will find the log books of Mike’s ancestor. And officers’ notes covering the years following Franklin’s death. When at least a handful of men continued to fight on against the relentless cold, trading with local hunters, and at times feeding on the corpses of their mates.
FRANCOIS’S CRUISE
At some stage, we learned that François was invited to go on a cruise this summer from Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada, in the East to Anchorage, Alaska, USA, in the West, on a small Hurtigruten ice-class “expedition” cruise liner. All the way through the Northwest Passage, weather permitting.
(c) Hurtigruten
GIN CHIN-CHIN
Leven suggested that perhaps François could find out who on board the cruiseliner is responsible for purchasing of alcohol. Then he could pass the details on to us, so that we could tell them about the expedition gin, and hopefully convince them to stock up on it. The passengers of the cruise ship could enjoy a bit of expedition tipple while passing by Hermione in the Northwest Passage next month. What a great idea.
MERCENARIES’ MURKY MIDNIGHT DEALS
Leven also told us how he purchased one of his previous record-breaking ocean rowing boats from a group of French Foreign Legionnaires after midnight in some tavern in a questionable part of Paris. No one knew how precisely the mercenaries had gotten hold of it or why they were selling it. You don’t tend to be too inquisitive when dealing with these types.
