Before we went to sleep, we made a video for you on which you could have seen that it was quite windy, that the tent was shaking... - at that time we were still in a good mood joking about the winds and stuff. We were like: “Haha, the tent is dancing in the wind...but we don’t mind it until we’re inside... :-)” Half an hour later we stopped laughing. The walls of the tent did not warp under the heavy winds any more...this time we were warped under the walls. Imagine that you lie in a tent in your sleeping bag and the tent, which completely lost its shape under the fierce wind by that time, pushes you to the ground. We were packed like sardines. We tried to support the poles and hold the tent in its shape but after three hours we gave up. The wind raged outside and we just lay down hoping that once the poles break, we’d be at least lucky enough to spend the night in what remains from the tent. I don’t want to dramatize it, neither I want to worry our families and friends but we really had a hard time yesterday night. You know, what if the tent had torn in half... well, it didn’t so it’s pointless to think about what if this or that :-)
It’s probably clear that we didn’t get much sleep tonight - or I didn’t. I think that Vasek might have dozed for a moment but it definitely wasn’t a good night sleep. We spent most of the night buried under our shapeless tent - we were freezing when the walls touched our sleeping bags. I tried to sacrifice my left side trying to keep at least the rest of my body warm but you cannot remain motionless for hours. We didn’t get a wink of sleep and we looked like that in the morning. We were more tired than yesterday’s night and without any wish to leave our warm sleeping bags. But, what else can we do... We have to grit our teeth, get up and do something to warm ourselves up. I prefer to do it quickly. I get out of my sleeping bag, put my boots on right away and jump out of the tent. No hesitation...after all, there’s nothing to wait for - it won’t get warmer :-) Once we’re out of the tent and we start with the packing, we finally fully wake up and after a minute we even warm ourselves up. It usually takes us about an hour to pack everything and than we’re ready to go.
And what about today? We were lucky to have quite a pleasant day. It was sunny with only moderate southern wind which we were grateful for - it wasn’t blowing against us, quite the contrary, it was pushing us slightly towards our goal in the north. Unfortunately it wasn’t to stay like this all day. In the afternoon, the wind turned to the east - so did our sleds. They quickly slid towards east where they remained till the end of the day. They were suddenly so strongly attracted to the eastern shore that we had a hard time to make them follow us where we went. We must have looked funny walking straight with the sleds following us unwillingly on the right hand side. Vašek tried to make some shots of it with a video camera so hopefully you’ll see some of it in the documentary.
One more thing - we want to thank sooooo much to the team of the North Trappers company which fully equipped us with clothing by Devold and Bergans! Without such great clothes we wouldn’t be as warm and comfortable as we are during the day.
