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30.11.09
A routine is established
Polar expeditions, like every day life, are all about routines and it sounds as though Felicity and the team have just established theirs...
Felicity (UK)'s PodCast:
Link to Podcast
Felicity's PodCast in writing:
"Hello, this is Felicity. This is leader giving you an update on day number 8.
Really pleased to report that we're doing really, really well. Everyone is in good spirits and we're making absolutely great progress.
We're currently 20 nautical miles ahead of where we expected to be right now. That's brilliant because it means that when the bad weather hits us we can spend a day in a tent and still not be behind schedule. So we're all looking forward to having a rest day at some point when the weather goes bad. We're making up the time that we lost due to the late start at the beginning. So we still hope to be at the South Pole by New Year's Day as planned which is brilliant.
One week in and we definitely have a routine established. At the moment our day starts at about 6:30, and we get up, we have breakfast and get the tent down, and we usually start skiing by about 9:00. We ski during the day in 90 minute legs with everyone taking a turn at leading and navigating at the front of the group. We ski in one long row and have a 7 minute break after each leg to eat and drink something. We're very strict about the seven minutes. We even have a time keeper that counts down the minutes so we know how long we've got left.
We've been doing five legs a day so that's about 8 hours on the go but today we tried extending that to 6 legs and it seemed to work well so we're going to stick with that. We're going to do 6 legs a day. That's about 10 hours on the go.
We stopped skiing about 7pm this evening put up the tents had some dinner and then a bit of time to do jobs. Today my job is doing the comms.
We have a daily phone call with Patriot Hills at ten past eight each evening. Patriot Hills is the base camp where we flew into Antarctica and we keep in daily contact wit hhtem to give htem our positon so they know exactly where we are in case we need help.
Then usually we're in bed by about 10 o'clock each evening ready to have some sleep and do it all over again the next morning. We're working really hard out here so all your messages are really helping. Thank you so much. Please keep them coming. Speak to you again next week. Bye!"
Photo by Robert Hollingworth