07 06 99

Position: 66° 20' 16" N 43° 12' 18° W

Diane's note: clear transmission today. The sastrugi that Laurie mentions are frozen ice waves or wind sculpted snow. You can see a photo of sastrugi taken in Antarctica at http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/lb_images/corps/corp1473.htm

We've just had the hardest day of the whole trip. The problem is that every time it's snowed it's made it difficult, but this time it didn't just snow; it continued to snow for 72 hours. So 3 days ago ago it was snowing and our distance was reduced from an expected 20 kms to 15 kms.

It continued to snow. The drifts got bigger and filled in more of the cracks and holes between the sastrugi. Yesterday we managed 9.34 kms. It still continued to snow all night and didn't stop until this afternoon. As a consequence the drifts are huge at times, close to a metre deep, although we can't see that because the surface is pretty level. As it filled in all the spaces and holes that were there before some of them are extremely deep indeed.

It's absolutely horrendous. Out of 8 hours of great struggle today we managed 7.53 kms., less than 1 km per hour and that wasn't just the case of an easy km. per hour. It was a case of constant heaving and pulling taking turns about every half hour or so up front to break it up.

We think we're at the high point of about 8 400 feet. As I mentioned before, our maps are conflicting. One of the maps would indicate that we still have another 500 feet to climb and another 20-30 kms. Over the afternoon we found we were descending a little bit. It didn't feel like it although our instruments showed that. Whether it's a temporary descent or if it's the beginning of the downhill we're not sure.

Even if it is downhill, we can't reach any distance, certainly no more than 10 kms per day in these conditions. It's absolutely horrendous. All we can do is struggle on. At least the weather tonight is nice. The sun came out this afternoon. It's stopped snowing now and it's calm outside.

We had hoped to use the sails. There was a bit of wind this morning and we just got them out and nicely launched and the wind dropped entirely. It's nice to travel without wind, but on the other hand we really need it now. We don't need the gale force wind but we need the winds behind us to help us sail. The wind dropped. It stopped snowing and the sun came out. The whiteout changed. That's something significant. It's very tiresome travelling in whiteout conditions all the time and we've gone through 3 days of no visibility, just travelling by instruments. It's very exacting and hard work to do that. At least we've got visibility tonight.

We continue to push on. We're looking forward to tomorrow. Today was totally exhausting.

End of transmission

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