Wow!

I received the following email a couple of weeks ago and I have permission to post it here. Scary stuff, and it couldn't have happened without the generous and enthusiastic support of all y'all out there. Thanks for a great ride!

Lists are tricky but very special thanks to Pete, McQ, Kimbra, Steves J. and W., Speedy and Malcolm, Leroy Chiao and Pascal Lee.

Hello Alex,

It is my distinct pleasure to inform you that the Board of Directors of The Cruising Club of America have voted to award you the 2010 Blue Water Medal, "for a most meritorious example of seamanship". The award will be made at our annual dinner at the New York Yacht Club on March 4th 2011. We are prepared to provide transportation and accomodations. I need your regular mailing address so that I might send a more formal letter, and it would help if you could provide me with a telephone number for reaching you.

Congratulations! and Well Done!

Bob Drew, Chair, Awards Comm.

www.cruisingclub.org

The Arthur C. Clarke greenhouse

It's getting cold and dark up there. Thanks Keith for the link.

http://www.spaceref.com/gallery/greenhouse1.html

More wildlife

A Huntsman in the letter box - also gorgeous, but shy and harmless.

And a Kookaburra at sunset.

Sydney wildlife

A redback spider - gorgeous beast with a nasty bite (treat with an ice pack to solidify the venom). This one is big, about 25mm across - she was inside the spout of the little watering jug and I disturbed her when I filled it.

And a lizard on a rock beside the harbour, about 40 cm long.

Look who's in town

Ably assisted by the good Dr Cooper.

http://picasaweb.google.com.au/alex1whit/AProperConsultation#

And another

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11172543

We were dodging sandbars as we passed close to Gjoa Havn. It seems this tanker was on a routine supply trip to the local communities.

Onya!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/sailing/7966301/Ellen-MacArthur-I-cant-live-with-the-sea-any-more.html

Nice day in the Arctic

Here's the latest webcam image of the greenhouse and Berrimilla's rock.

http://yfrog.com/gi8otoj

The Arthur C. Clarke greenhouse

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/08/27/mars-greenhouse-arctic.html

Donated by Keith's company, SpaceRef and built by Keith and Marc, SpaceRef geniuses...

Murphy

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2010/08/29/north-cruise-ship-stranded.html?ref=rss

Some HMP links and other stuff

I've been chastised for neglecting the blog - sorry, been in the wilds of Brisbane sitting in on a Marine Watchkeepers' course playing with fire, amongst other things.

Here are the links to things happening at HMP and the Mars Institute.

http://www.marsonearth.org/

http://www.marsonearth.org/2010/07/

http://www.marsonearth.org/multimedia/gh-webcam1.html   You can see Berrimilla's rock to the right of the ridge on the horizon above the greenhouse - cool! The wind turbines on the poles are the same as we used on Berrimilla.

For the ride home, I found a copy of Michael Collins' book 'Carrying the Fire' (NY, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) reissued in 2009 for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Beautifully written and evocative. Hard to believe that those three guys are all 80 this year.

Opposites

http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/features/contenthandler.cfm?id=2232

Courtesy of Dale Andersen, who was one of the people in the bar in Baton Rouge at the genesis of Berri's NW Passage gig.
 
The other end of the world -HMP's John Schutt and the Resolute Twotters are all going down there in September. Envy! The Twotters fly down from Resolute and across Drake Passage from Punta Arenas (I think) and the pole - what a ride

Two days out from tomorrow

I'm sitting under a tree about 100 metres from the building at the centre of the old Naval Air Station at Moffett Field where the Admiral once had his office. There's a big flagpole with the Stars and Stripes and it's a glorious day – just a bit of misty haze that filters the deep blue of the sky. I'm hanging around for a couple of hours before my lift to the airport and my flight back to Sydney – the redeye that leaves at 2250 and arrives on the other side of the dateline at 0610 after adding a day to the date.

 The contrast is extraordinary. The stark, bleakly indifferent ice age landscape on Devon Island with its savage beauty and its tiny wonderfully adapted wild flowers, its damp fog and its  cloudbase that blends with your consciousness, the occasional sunshine through the exhilarating clarity of an almost unpolluted atmosphere – and the silence so deep that you can hear it – these things don't live in the same world as the crimson rose and the rampant daisies beside me. Yet they do – and that's the point – Mars (almost) on Earth.

 A memorable three weeks rounded off yesterday by dinner with Pascal's asteroid team who are developing a plan to land humans on an asteroid and do some science….

And there I was interrupted  in full  hyperbolic tilt by a text from Pascal requiring me to front the Medical Review Board, Dr Cooper himself, no less. Noice!

And now I'm at SFO airport having spent a significant dollop of tolerance and an hour convincing the United check in staff that I am actually booked on my flight – I suspected that my earlier euphoria was premature and so it was. But I have a boarding pass - we'll see if it gets me on the plane!

 I will try to summarise the 2010 HMP program in my next. Meantime all the photos are now on the website – just follow the earlier link.

More photos

http://picasaweb.google.ca/alex1whit

Today, DV & WP - C130 to Vancouver, then to Moffett Field tomorrow. Oh Joy - United have changed my ticket (and waived the fee!!) to allow me to fly back to Sydney from SFO.

Would be a real blast if the weather is clear and we can retrace some of Berrimilla's track from two years ago on the way to Yellowknife.

Resolute! Thanks all round.

By the skin of our teeth as it were. Rescued by a Government Inspector, no less, who blew in in an empty aircraft to do a routine inspection and lifted the 7 of us who have to get somewhere else urgently out of HMP. Thanks!

Sad to leave the Crater - a very special week with some very special people out in the boonies. Thanks Pascal and all y'all on the project.

And thanks to Steve J, who, I understand, has cleaned up the website  yet again while I fiddled in the background.

I now must do a search for flights that will get me to the Church aka Ottawa Airport on time. Complicated as I have to decide where to get off the C130 and I don't yet know when we will leave tomorrow.

If I can keep my eyes open after that, I will put the rest of my photos on picasa.

Antsy and downto the wire...

Still beside the Crater. 11 antsy people, some way more so than others, and Pascal and me - we all know that we may yet be here for another 10 days - each of us coping with our own mental agendas as we create our own little areas of turbulence or calm in the ghostly skeleton of the camp. Ping Pong in charge, her ears in full attention and brain in gear - I'm sure she has a Plan!

The weather is now just inside the marginal for flying - we've been keeping hourly skeds with Polar Shelf in Resolute - "Ok - 350 to 500 ft, no precipitation, vis 4 miles...seems to be breaking up in the lower layer - we can see the sun's disc - we can see the upper level cloud through the gaps - back to 300 ft, rain, no breaks - looking better to the west - call back in an hour while we check the satellite data - seems to be clearing over the Wellington Channel...". And so it goes.

Right now, Resolute has the first signs of a real break and it's moving towards us...we'll call you again in an hour...

I wrote earlier about the geological treasure chest we are living in. HMP have lent me some samples of breccia and shatter cones (at 39 million years old) and a bit of fossilised coral from a 450 million year old Barrier Reef to show to schools in Australia and perhaps to generate projects and experiments for the camp as contributions to the space program. Physics, medicine, communications, geology, astronomy - anything relevant to the space program is ok. Just keep it simple and focused. If there are any teachers reading this - get in touch! HMP would be especially pleased to have Australian schools involved.

So we mingle and dissipate and find things - mindless things, often - to do to pass the time. Almost everything except toilet paper is packed away - the kettles are still cooking water, the little generator makes this email possible, last minute jobs await the departure of the plane from Resolute - or not. Almost the last job will be bearproofing the Humvee as far as is possible. I have seen photos of the devastation caused by a hungry bear and it's astounding. This particular bear probably departed on a caffeine high judging by the state of the instant coffee jars. The camp has learned from that experience and now stores remaining food in the Humvee and locks and cargo straps it. Even so, a bear nearly got through last year by distorting an aluminium door.

My bags are packed, for the fourth time, and this bit of bloggery is a time sponge. If we don't get out this afternoon, I must cancel my return flight to Sydney and plead with United to let me rebook it. That will be an interesting discussion. I can hear the rain clattering on the tent - not looking good...Hanging in for that break over Wellington to come this way...

Geological treasures - history in the landscape.

No change - or if any, for the worse. Foggy, cold drizzle, enough breeze to add a chill factor and drive the drizzle into your face and elsewhere on the trek to the drum and with the little things that matter exposed.

So - 13 of us, temporarily marooned in a tent complex in a geological treasure chest. The camp is close to the remains of a 350 million year old coral reef with fossils from before fish had teeth. Channels, canyons and lakebeds everywhere, from the ice age and the great melt - the valleys were formed by moving ice and water as the huge ice sheet melted. This site was under about 2 miles of ice which formed lakes as it melted and then rivers that carried deposited silt on to flood plains and down to the sea. There are huge rocks scattered around that were carried on the surface of the ice and dropped through as it melted - called, not surprisingly, drop-stones. Berrimilla's Rock is a piece of the original coral reef that broke off an exposed ridge perhaps 10,000 years ago and rolled down to its present spot.

And the camp is beside the Haughton Crater, formed about 39 million years ago by the impact of a meteorite estimated to have been half a mile across. The meteorite vaporised as it impacted, bringing up the geological strata from a mile below the surface and melting it in the explosion so that as it cooled it became breccia - a complex mix of once molten fragments and cooling vapour that is a a grey and rough rock - until you cut it and polish the surface to reveal the complexity of the structure of the rock. The crater was formed in a few seconds as the molten fragments spread outwards at a kilometre a second. Pascal is, among other things, a geologist and he is taking samples this year for analysis to try to establish the composition of the meteorite impactor.

The end of time

Here we (still) are in a sort of ghostly hibernation - the camp metabolism down to a minimal heartbeat, the tents unlit and shadowy wraiths in slo-mo animation inside. I can see 7 laptops some with attendant hooded and earphoned face glowing and flickering with reflected light of a movie or computer game. The little generator toiling away outside, one stove going in the big mess tent just keeping it habitable. Earlier, the rain was clattering against the sides of the tent, blown by the gusty 25 knot wind bringing polar cold from the north. A short gap a few hours ago when it looked as if the aircraft might fly and I packed my bags for the third time - wrong! The wind has died to a much more gentle blast but the cloudbase has not lifted.

So here we sit. The C130 should be in Resolute by now and is due to leave again tomorrow. Doesn't look as if we will be on it unless it can wait for us and that means a whole lot of gear that is still here will need to be sent south by commercial flights when it can be moved out. Us too.

The camp gets its water from a stream a few hundred metres away. In normal operations, there's a water pump to get it up here. Not any more - all the pumping gear is packed away and we do a water run when heeded with jugs and big urns. Noodles and freeze dried food - back in Berrimilla mode for me but the food ain't so good here. One way I can certainly contribute is to make some suggestions as to what to bring next time. The only thing that gets cooked is water - big kettles on the tiny Coleman stove - and the hot water is kept in 2 big thermos containers and of course, is never hot enough for a good cup of tea! Two teabags and a long jiggly soak is the go, for a brownish stain in the water in my slowly collapsing paper cup that will I keep recycling until it dies.

Pascal is writing his reports, John and his people are at the moment out in the cold fetching more fuel drums and finishing all the close-down jobs that can be done without squeezing the heartbeat out of the place while we are still living here. The others are sleeping or here with their laptops.

It is beginning to get darker at night - it is now 2315 and quite gloomy inside the tent - I can only just see to type. The 300ft cloudbase doesn't help.

Outside, bleak, wet, misty magnificence. I will post more photos when I have a proper link again. The mess tent in what I hope will be its last few hours of animation before it slowly becomes a crystal cave in the dark of winter.

Perhaps tomorrow...

This and that - passing the time

0400 Friday 13th

Yesterday evening just for fun, I pulled in the GRIB weather for Devon Island and Resolute. It was giving 10 kts from the north at midday today - perfect for flying out. I did not specify precipitation in the file...and it has been blowing about 30 kts and gusting ever since, with heavy rain. The rain is abating and the cloudbase is now about 1000 ft but still gusty 25+. Will be an interesting day!

There are still two hardy people camped out in personal tents - everyone else has moved into one of the sturdier permanent tents . I've just braved the frigid blast to go across to the mess tent and make some coffee (works better than tea when the water is tepid!) and Ben is sitting next to the stove, hoodied (twice, I think) and headphoned watching movies on his laptop. Slept all day yesterday, he said - what else is there to do? Actually, he worked his butt off yesterday. The kids from Grise Fiord are all wired into the information age - iphones and laptops - and they find it easier to pass the time than I do.

An over simplified explanation of the politics: HMP is just outside an area owned by the native peoples of Nunavut which includes the whole of the Haughton Crater. The Grise Fiord community come across from Ellesmere Island to hunt and fish in the bays and inlets just to the north. Nunavut now has a capital, Iqaluit and, at least in theory, all the communities are administered from there. I suspect that it is just in theory. Each community speaks for itself as far as I can tell, and with some force. Just as with native title areas in Australia, permission is required to enter native lands and NASA has to go through the process each year in order to gain access to the Crater. In return, the Project employs local people and whenever possible uses community facilities - the Co-Op shop and the Co-Op hotel in Resolute, for instance.

And the rain is back. We will call Resolute in a couple of hours and we are on standby for whatever is available given the conditions. The C130 is due into Resolute tonight - no predictions at this stage but we did learn 2 years ago that things change amazingly fast up here.

Tomorrow will be the second anniversary of Berrimilla's transit of the ice in Franklin Sound - that scarily beautiful 0300 pinkout with a solid ice centre that, to me, marked the critical point in our NW Passage transit. A sort of full circle if we actually make it to Resolute this time!

Another night in the boonies

The fog has lifted - just a bit. About a mile vis, lots of crosswind. No aircraft available - we are to call Polar Shelf again in an hour. Still a chance we could get out today but I think it's slim.

The best laid plans - while setting up to send the last one via Iridium I discovered that when I loaded the Sailmail application into this computer for this trip I forgot to transfer Berrimilla's address book and Sailmail only recognises addresses in its address book. And the blog address is complicated and I could not remember it - senile old fart that I am. So a phone call to my sister Isabella in the UK and she fired up my Gmail account and extracted the address from that. Egg all over face, but embarrassment tempered by fix.

The Humvee is jacked up on blocks for the winter - but not yet sealed. The mess tent still has power, the Palace of the Imperial Throne is cold and windy but functional - makes one wonder how the Franklin and Shackleton people managed in the icy and open conditions they faced, and for months at a time. The parts shrivel in sympathy! And I think about the need to go outside the shelter to empty the pee bucket on Elephant Island (and what to do about those who cheated) and I wonder how I would have survived - if at all. Hmm.

Everyone finding things to do - watching movies on their laptops, sleeping, writing blogs...again, how did the early survivors cope with the unknown - how long would it last; how to pass the time, day after day; peoples' idiosyncrasies that are ok when things are going well but grate under stress.

So who is left here - Steve Braham's team of communications heroes: Steve, resident super boffin, Parna, Isiah and Vik; the support team of John Schutt - amazing man and central pillar of the camp (Google him - astonishing career) with Jesse and Travis and the three kids hired from the Grise Fiord Community - Ben, Terry and Salya; then there's Geoff, the cook who now has no kitchen and Pascal and me. And, of course, Ping Pong.

Just heard no flights today - if we are lucky, then early tomorrow. We have all day to get to Resolute and load the Herc. Vancouver Saturday evening if all goes well.

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