Day 8 - Update

Some of you may have noticed a lack of updates in recent days and that today we started to head back to Resolute Bay. We are both well but a communications breakage has left us with a communications situation which we are unhappy to continue with. Hence this morning we made the hard decision to turn - to continue would be foolhardy and go against all of our experience and training.

We will update once in Resolute Bay - expected over the weekend. What next for us and individually it is too early to say.

Thanks for all your support and we will update at the weekend.

Writing this in the dark waiting for dinner, chicken Kung po again ... Menu changes on day 10 to Spag Bol for 10 days in a row. Saw some hunters out today asking if we'd seen bears - thankfully not!

Cold fingers today due to biting wind, so a short update. Dinner sleep ski blog dinner ski - how simple has life become ... but stress of getting stoves lit, eating and keeping the comms working play on our mind all the time. Passenger playing on the IPod and dinner to eat.

Until tomorrow

Matt and Kev

Day 5 - Lessons

Today ended well with custard for dinner (chicken korma and cheese first - don't ask about the cheese), but started badly as I need to go to the toilet (so cold it's done in the tent) so with Kev still in his sleeping bag I was up, sorted or so I thought. I then spent the next 30mins cleaning myself and my clothing up. All this at 43years old! What was worse was this meant we started late.

The weather improved after lunch and we finished skiing as the sun set below the horizon. So this is being written by head torch whilst I listen to Snow Patrol and Martha Wainright play 'set the fire to the third bar' whilst Kev boils water for our Nalgene hot water bottles. We expect another cold night so no picture tonight.

Hope you all have a great weekend - we are going skiing!

Another short day due to weather, although we had always planned the first 4 days would be short to allow us to get ourselves sorted on the ice. Last night was the coldest so far and our thermometer whilst skiing showed -42. We stopped as the wind started to whip snow into our faces making the visibility even worse - our horizon has been about 500m all day. The photo shows Kev skiing through some of the churned up ice we have had to negotiate. We knew the ice was worse than last year but at the moment finding any flat ice pans is proving to be difficult!

Kung po chicken on the menu tonight, then a night shivering wearing all my clothes to look forward to!

Day 3 - Storm

A short day of just under 3 miles - we stopped early as we are currently sat in a blizzard. The wind has picked up and visibility is down to about 50ft. So we are hunkered down listening to music and doing some admin. To be honest not what we wanted at this stage but storm days are inevitable ... But I was hoping for them later on. The plan remains for another 2 short days and then we will start to increase the daily time out on the skis. But getting up in the morning is an epic. Anyway chicken korma for dinner later and ice cold in Alex playing on the iPod.

Until tomorrow ....

Day 2 - the wind picks up

We awoke after a fitful sleep to a glorious day, and set off for another short 'get you in day'. The plan was to ski for 4hrs, we skied for 5.5hrs only stoping when the wind began blowing hard. Last year in these conditions we had a nightmare, today was slick! As I write this, tired and sore, Kev is getting the water on for dinner - Kung po.chicken .... We will eat and sleep as the chat is pretty dire.

It is a sublime thing to suffer and be stronger.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Day 1 - An interesting start

We are currently sat in the tent listening to the sound of the stove, which is better than Skunk's howling or Kev's chat. A short day to get our legs in which we will repeat for the next 2 days. We are waiting for Silas (Skunk's owner), as he is going back. A good idea which hasn't worked, we will explain more later - but he isn't very good at spotting or reacting to bears. In fact a bear less than 200m away failed to get a reaction or interest from Skunk as Kev and I thought we were in an advance to contact. We also found that bear whistles attract rather than scare bears.

We are both in good spirits and looking forward to the weeks ahead.