Inside the Polynya
On route from Iglulik
Hi, it’s Glenn here. We just camped; the stars are all out now, it’s a very cold night. Most days are sort of long, cold and hard, and we’re coming down Admiralty Strait — Admiralty Inlet, Simon’s just told me. We’re making good progress; we’re probably about eighty kilometres from Arctic Bay, so we’re not sure whether we’re going to get there tomorrow or not – tomorrow being Saturday. Our position at the moment is 72degrees, 18 minutes North and 84 degrees, 59 minutes West.
We’re not too bad; I think we’ll either get to Arctic Bay late tomorrow night or early Sunday sometime. We’re running low on food ; for the dogs that is, not for us, and one of Simon’s friends came by today on a skidoo and loaded us up with a load of seal so we’ve just had some of that for our meal as well. So the dogs are well fed and they’re content. That’s pretty good because, yesterday, or the day before yesterday, Simon said “Oh they’re getting dangerous, because they’re not being fed enough.” So, they’re happy now.
A short while back, we passed by the polynya and it was a beautiful, clear day, we could see for miles, but in the distance you could see what looked like a sort of thunder cloud, just hanging over the ice, and when we got nearer and nearer, we actually entered the cloud which, of course, is a sort of vapour that hangs above the polynya.
A polynya, incidentally, is an area of constantly open water – and Simon was keen to get to the polynya, because it’s a good place to hunt seals, so we sort of took the dog- sledge in, but the current was going the wrong way. Apparently it has to go a certain way so the seals gather at one corner of the polynya and then they can be harpooned easily.
We waited a while and Simon was wondering the current would change, but of course we could have waited six hours maximum or one or two hours; we didn’t really know. So Simon pointed out some enormous polar bear tracks and said do I want to camp there. I said “Well, not really, if it means meeting a polar bear.” So he sort of, laughed and we moved on and so we didn’t really hunt any seals at the polynya, but I suspect we may well on the way back, because it seems to me that we’re probably going to re-trace our tracks on the way back from Pond Inlet.
Anyway, one more interesting thing about the polynya; when you’re in there, it feels like you’re suddenly sort of, under a cloud, and it’s actually quite eerie because you can’t and you don’t know where there are polar bears around, and of course if there were, you don’t really know where they are. And, of course, that is one place they are going to gather.
All’s well, otherwise and I think I’ll give another update when we get to Arctic Bay, so goodbye!
