Day 12
S81 45' 14.04", W80 13' 2.28"
///interventionism.adoption.meatless
The terrain continues to challenge, with patched of ice and sastrugi. The wind picks up again, but progress continues to be steady.
“Hi everyone, it’s Martin. Day 12 on the expedition.
We’ve done 14.2 nautical miles today, so some good progress. We’ve had clear visibility again, thankfully, and we’ve had a bit of a wind today, coming in from the south west, which was hitting us kind of front right. Not quite a headwind, but just off to the right, and mercifully that was only about 15 knots, which is not too strong, but strong enough to make you feel it, and you have to work a bit harder.
The terrain’s been pretty challenging as well, although because of the temperature and the combination of the temperature and wind, it kind of go through these patches where it’s quite icy, and it’s quite easy to slip, and then suddenly you’ll hit a bit of fresh snow, and you’re working quite hard to drag the pulk through, ‘cause the pulk’s still quite heavy, it’s still early on.
We’ve got to be careful of the terrain, but other than that, we literally just had a view of what we’re going to have for the next few hundred miles now, which is just snow and ice and sastrugi, albeit fairly small sastrugi areas at the minute, thankfully. They’re due to get bigger as we progress… as far as the eye can see. So it’s just a case of head down and really trying to churn out the miles as efficiently as we can. Starting to feel stronger. Not quite as on point with the heat regulation early on, with the layering system. My paralysed arm doesn’t sweat, and that makes the rest of my body hotter, and the base layer I had on was too warm. And that was causing me to get quite wet at times, with all the exertion, the phys aspect of what we’re doing. I changed to a different layering system a few days ago, and that’s working pretty well now. So it seems to be doing a good job.
I just want to finish off tonight with another thank you. There’s been multiple sponsors for this expedition; it’s expensive trying to get down here and do anything, just because of the location, and the cost of travel down here. But Michael Bickford at Round Hill Capital; I didn’t even get to meet, due to covid, but as soon as he found out what we were trying to achieve - with the Adaptive Grandslam and this expedition – he was really keen to get on board.
He’s a big believer that our values are aligned to their values as a business, and we were trying to achieve something that they were passionate about. So I just wanted to say thank you to all the team at Round Hill Capital for all your support, and to Michael. Also to Samantha Rush, at Round Hill Captial, who’s been helping us on the marketing side. I really appreciate it. I’m going to try my best to get that flag to the South Pole, and also hopefully to the top of Mount Vinson as well.
Thank you very much guys, stay safe and goodnight. Another day’s skiing tomorrow.”
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