The accompanying picture is the a representation of the subject of all our attention; an ice chart from The Canadian Ice Service. We download these charts once a day and try to get a picture of the speed and direction of the ice melt. The areas in red are 9-10/10ths ice, yellow are 7/10ths and the areas in green are 1-2/10ths ice, the later being ice that we can move through with very little problem. If you look closely to the upper right of the large, red area you can see a lot of green with even some blue (we’re just to the upper left of this area), this was red only a few days ago. This is good news in that a lead is opening up for us, but not quite ready. Unusually high temperatures and an expected NE breeze will help open this even more giving us a clear run down to Gjoa Haven in perhaps four to five days. Obviously this isn’t anything we want to rush so, we continue to wait; we read, sleep, eat, read, sleep and eat… and try to give one another as much space as possible.
Years ago I had the great pleasure to do some work with and eventually became a friend of Ned Gillette’s. If you don’t know of Ned’s exploits he was a world adventurer who ultimately met a very tragic demise. He was a gentleman, a philosopher and a great mentor to many. At one point he and I discussed “Expedition Manners”. Ned pointed out that at some point during an expedition one should develop the “Five Minute Rule”; think five minutes before you ask a question and wait five minutes before you answer one. Happily we’re not quite there yet but it does keep running through my mind.
We arrived at Beechy Island yesterday around 2:00 in the afternoon in a dieing breeze. The weather window has held beautifully for us and it’s my dire hope that these days of grace extend through the Bering Sea! Beechy Island is a “ground zero” for me. This whole trip/documentary has been to travel the passage, but the fact that this was the last true known area where the Franklin Expedition was intact, for me, is the hallowed of the hallowed. Hundreds of lives have been lost trying to find this passage but no expedition has garnered more attention and mystery than that of John Franklin’s. Long story short, he left England in 1850 with two ice proven ships (they were the ships that “discovered” Antarctica) with 128 men. The expedition was to last two years. Neither the men nor the ships were ever heard from or seen again. Over 30 international expeditions went in search of the missing Franklin Party. Apart from some artifacts that local Inuit had, an occasional found pile of sawed bones (suggested cannibalism) and an extremely confounding note which was left in a cairn on King William Island, Franklin’s Expedition remains one of history’s largest mysteries.
For their day, these men were international heroes, not unlike our astronauts. Their ships were the equivalent of say, our Gemini program, state of the art. Their complete and utter disappearance would be akin to that of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon and simply vanishing. I am extremely humbled and awe struck that Bagan now rests on her anchor in the very bay Franklin’s two ships, the ‘Erebus” and the “Terror” were trapped in the ice for two years.
Once settled in, the shore and filming parties were arranged. Greg and I broke out the dry suits and did an hour long dive. The bottom is as featureless as the landscape here; it’s flat and seemingly goes on forever. Small sea urchins and clams pock-mark an otherwise devoid ocean floor. The water was 40 degrees and the visual around 80’. After a little over an hour we surfaced with some fantastic HD footage (each day’s coverage gets better and better!) of a very intriguing bottom feature. Even though we have underwater communications with each other as well as the surface it was extremely reassuring to surface and see Sefton, Chauncey and Dom’s smiling faces. Clinton was manning the underwater coms and was also in charge of polar bear watch with rifle at the ready. Shortly before I surfaced I remembered a comment I heard in Halifax regarding polar bears; “If you see one, the chances are that he’s been hunting you for quite a while.” They’ve been seen swimming over a hundred miles from land.
