A ghost degree

Published on 19.04.2007 - The Arctic Arc

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One degree left before the two men come up to the first stage of their big adventure. Three or four days from now, they should indeed reach the north pole.

Yesterday, before starting up the day again, Alain Hubert wanted to go over last week for a moment. Because, when you come to think about it, the two men still wonder how they could have progressed so quickly on such a rotten ground. "Since the weekend of April 6th", explained Hubert by phone yesterday, "we have not had a slightest day of good weather. We have in fact had almost everything else in the past eight days: some mist and snow, quite a bit of wind, a negative drift, one or two big storms, etc. Actually, in talking with Dixie yesterday, we wonder which way we possibly could have come from. This is why we baptised the 88th degree the ghost degree..."

And things don't seem to be getting any better, since, for two days now, the men have been skiing with water over their feet. "There is water everywhere", continued Alain, "we must constantly cross leads, either by finding pathways or by turning our sledges into catamarans. This is probably due to the fact that temperatures have become quite milder these past few days, -18°C yesterday morning and -11°C yesterday evening. As a matter of fact, we learned that it was a complete mess in Barneo for the moment and that almost a hundred tourists were waiting, being that the airplanes were not able to land."