Day 15
S82 25' 59.88", W80 21' 21.60"
///jumbos.bigness.qualified
Antarctica continues to throw everything at the team; with ice, sastrugi and strong winds again. Progress has slowed today. Martin's left Achilles is giving him trouble, and they're trying to treat it in the tent after a long, hard day.
“Hi good evening everyone, it’s Lou reporting in now from day 15 of the expedition.
Every day is different out here; despite that fact that we’re skiing across the continent, there’s different challenges every day. And it’s – there’s a saying amongst the Polar community that there’s no such thing as an easy day in Antarctica, and that is so true. It’s just different levels of difficulty. And today was a battle. It really was, from start to finish.
We woke up this morning to quite strong winds again. Pretty much a bang-on head wind. So it was quite challenging getting the tent down, packing all the gear. And we were keen to get moving by that time we as we were pretty cold. Temperatures were right down with the wind chill – I’m guessing in the late -20s, probably almost into -30, with the amount of ice that was building up around our faces early on in the day. But it was a really struggle battling against the wind and you could tell we were going so much slower. And then we came into a really unusual area of ice. We’ve had a little bit of light sastrugi, but we suddenly hit this climb and the terrain changed completely and there were these really big ice hummocks. We were really struggling to make ground, pulling the pulks up quite a steep incline, with a headwind, over this quite intense sastrugi. I ended up putting the skis back on with the full skins. Martin had a ¾ skin on and he ended up walking for a bit, and we were just trying different things to make progress through this area. And it was about a mile or so, working our way through it. And eventually we got the incline done, and it levelled out and then the terrain improved again. But we still had quite strong winds. So we lost quite a bit of time battling our way through there; and we felt pretty exhausted by the time we got to the top of that, and we plodded on for the rest of the day.
We had to finish slightly early. Martin’s left Achilles tendon is giving him quite a lot of grief. He’s obviously heavily loading on that side, because obviously that’s the one side he’s got the ski stick. So he puts a lot of pressure down through that Achilles.
So after a hard day battling the elements; the terrain and the headwinds, we’re in the tent this evening and enjoying our rest and recuperation. We’re just focusing on Martin’s Achilles tendon. His left one, that’s been playing him up at the moment. So we’ve been icing that; taking some ibuprofen, a lot of stretching, and hoping it’s going to hold out and we can get in another full day tomorrow.
Just to finish off, I want to give a shout out to my other daughter, Sophie, who’s based down in Cardiff as a criminal barrister. I know she’s really enjoying following our progress and the expedition, so I wanted to say hi to Sophes and her boyfriend Connor. And when I get back, we’ll have to head off to a Miller and Carter.
That’s all for this evening.
Onwards.”
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