Day 22
S84 10' 27.48", W80 50' 41.28"
///wildernesses.calculi.maven
Whiteout conditions prove to be a hinderance but the team have crossed 84 degrees south and are heading for the half-way point
“Day 22. Antarctica. The gift that keeps on giving.
Last night, we lost the sun at about 2100 hours. Which is no bad thing of an evening, because, when the sun’s out, it’s actually quite hot in the tent believe it or not. That results in one of us on one side of the tent being quite warm, that has the sun, and the other being quite cold, on the not-sunny side of the tent. So you end up waking up, part-way through the night, either to get into your sleeping bag, or to get out of it.
Last night it was cold inside the tent, which meant we got the best night’s sleep believe it or not. Probably five hours, five-and-a-half-hours straight last night, which is the first time I’ve had that much sleep since we’ve been here. So that was a good thing.
The bad thing about losing the sun, is that we woke up this morning to cloud everywhere, and what’s called flat-light conditions. Flat-light conditions means that you can’t really the topography in front of you. In this environment, it means you can’t see the dreaded sastrugi. And sastrugi fields so far from – you can get an area of sastrugi that’s maybe a foot long and a foot wide, and a foot in depth. Or three, four, five, six foot, even seven or eight foot some of them. We know we’ve got bigger sastrugi fields to come as well, when we get to about 87 degrees. That’ll be a right treat.
For now, flat-light conditions means you can’t see the sastrugi; and that means you fall. Or I fall. A lot. So within the first shift; we tend to do about four 90-minute shifts, and then bring them down to 60 minutes, unless conditions are good, in which case we try and keep them at 90. So the first four are 90-minute shifts, with a quick five- minute drink and food. And then we change over. And whoever is up front is leading, and navigating.
Within the first ten minutes of the first 90-minute shift. I fell over three times.
The first two were quite humorous, the third one, I gave myself a bit of a crack. I thought right, that’s it. These skis are coming off. Took the skis off and walked for the first 90 minutes. And that wasn’t a good sign for the rest of the day. Needless to say, today was a slog. The skis constantly coming on and off for me. Lou managed to keep his on. He has far better balance on this stuff than I do.
The visibility remained fairly poor for the rest of the day. We got one, merciful area, of about 70 minutes, mid-afternoon, when we could open up the pace a little. Not because the light improved, it didn’t, but the conditions underfoot improved, to deep soft snow, which meant we had to pull hard through the pulk, but at least I wasn’t falling over. That was quite a challenging day.
Despite that, we managed 13.6 nautical miles, which is more than I thought. I thought we’d only get about ten done today. So a challenging day. We’ve got more flat light tomorrow from our weather forecast, and potentially even fog. We’re going to go out there, give it another crack, and see what we can do. Luckily, there’s not much wind at the moment, a breeze, between five and 10 knots. Which comparatively to what we’ve been experiencing for the past few weeks has been nothing. So that’s good.
I want to do a shout out and a thank you tonight to someone who doesn’t like publicity at all. So I’ll call him Martin Scorsese. Martin, on multiple occasions, has stepped up to help us with Adaptive Grand Slam finances; whether that be taking some additional team members out, or helping me personally.
Thank you very much Martin Scorsese.”
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