Addicted to Adventure by Bob Shepton

Author:Bob Shepton [Shepton, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472905895
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

ARCTIC AGAIN AND THE TILMAN TRAVERSE

O Lord, when Thou givest to thy servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same until it be thoroughly finished that yields the true glory…

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

In June the next year I returned to Aasiaat and put Dodo’s Delight back in the water. I had spent some time that winter ski instructing in Villars, and much of the rest of it (as usual in the winter before an expedition) was taken up with preparations. In spite of an untimely strike by Greenland Air the crew joined me in the first week of July. Brian (a fellow boat owner) was signed up as mate, and he would look after Dodo while the rest of us were climbing. The other members of the crew – Andy, Matt and Peter (Maxi) – all worked or had worked at Aiglon College, an international boarding school in Villars in Switzerland. Fit young men in their late twenties and thirties, climbing and skiing was part of their work at the school. It promised to be a good team.

To have any hope of success our Tilman-type expedition, sailing and climbing in remote regions, needed careful planning. Bill Tilman must have been a tough old bird. In 1963, from his beloved boat Mischief, he and his climbing partner, Bruce Reid, who is still very much alive today, traversed north to south across Bylot Island, north of Baffin Island. Today it is hard to imagine how Tilman and Reid managed to carry fifteen days’ food (including sixteen tins of pemmican, a nutritious, concentrated mix of fat and protein) plus the heavy camping and climbing equipment of the day, on foot, to make their mountainous 84-kilometre trek. We intended to make the same traverse, but on skis. First, however, we had to get there.

We studied the ice charts on the internet before we left and from the boat’s weatherfax (a useful piece of kit both for weather and ice information) via Resolute. The charts show the concentration of ice in a particular area in tenths – 2/10ths, 3/10ths and so forth; 4–5/10ths would be pushing it in a small boat, especially in a glassfibre boat such as ours. Other information includes the size, thickness and age of ice floes; more detailed, but once you have learned how to interpret it, useful stuff.

We knew that the pack ice which forms right across Baffin Bay in the winter would not have cleared from the Greenland coast near the top in Melville Bay this early in the summer. There was no hope yet of getting across to Bylot Island on the Canadian side. But the ice chart did show that the ice had cleared from Uummannaq Fjord just to the north, so we made preparations to go for some remote unclimbed 2000-metre summits on the edge of the Greenland ice cap, and farther inland from the rock peaks we had climbed at Akuliarusinguaq three years earlier.

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