Ben Edwards Crew Laptev Sea 11th Aug
Success! I woke up this morning when we wieghed anchor. I checked what time it was and it was just after my watch so I went back to sleep. When I woke up again I discovered that overnight the ice had moved and in the time I’d been sleeping we’d managed to leave the archipelago and were now heading southwards through relatively thin ice to the coast. When I came on watch we were merrily dodging in and out of the ice under sail with no swell and little cold. It was the most fun I’ve had in weeks. Rather sadly however during the second hour of my watch we broke through the ice and into clear water near the coast. From then on we’ve been sailing due east staying out of the ice and skirting the coast. It’s this part of the trip that I love. We’re going in the right direction quickly with ice and land about and it doesn’t look like we’re going to be stopping soon. Though not much really exciting has happened weaving in and out of the ice can be quite, well, exciting. That didn’t make much sense did it. What I meant was nothing really unusual has happened. Although yesterday we came across our first proper iceberg. It was higher than the mast and had large holes bored right through it. Not a very pretty iceberg, it was webbed with mud, but it still counts.
The anchorage was good. We were quite sheltered from both the wind and the waves but we did have a bit of a tangle with a large chunk of ice but Denis saw it off with one of the ice poles. In the meantime my body clock has completely switched round. I’m now going to sleep a ten in the morning and getting up at six in the afternoon. This, I’m sure, will change when the nights start getting dark again but in the meantime I see little reason to try to rectify the situation. I quite like being alone and being awake while everyone else is asleep is a good way of doing that. On that point I think I’ll go to bed now. We hope to reach our next landmark by tomorrow, it’s named after Nikolai but you’ll have to read the next blog to find out more, bye.