After a ten day wait because of poor weather, the re-supply flight managed to land alongside the hungry Ice Team a few hours ago.  After a good feed – the three - Pen Hadow, Martin Hartley and Ann Daniels are already sounding much stronger.

“Our spirits are restored.  Now we just need our bodies to catch up,” is how Daniels put it in a message to the CAS London HQ.  “I can’t tell you how happy we are that the plane landed, rather than just did an air-drop of food.

It meant we had some human contact, were able to receive messages from home and handover everything we needed in terms of video and photographic material”.

Now, on day 67 of the expedition and with the drama of the delayed re-supply over, the team can reflect on just how difficult that prolonged wait was.   By the end, their emergency ration bags contained just 90g of food and the team were hungry long before that.

“Today I’ve had a cup of porridge, 3 pork scratchings, a piece of dried coconut and a finger of shortbread”, Hartley reported halfway through the ten day wait (prompting an anxious call to HQ from his Mum!).  “I’ve got 12 raisins left in my bag and 9 pieces of pineapple, each the size of a little finger”.  At this point Hartley estimated his daily calorie intake to be around the same as 3 Mars Bars.  This decreased in subsequent days.

“The weekend was particularly hard”, he added.  “On Saturday night we discussed how we should have been eating steak and chips in a nice pub somewhere”.

Although the team were evidently hungry and suffering some of the consequences, they say morale remained high.

“We had to stop drilling and doing scientific observations for a few days because it simply wouldn’t have been sensible, given the cold, the energy that the experiments demand and the lack of calorie intake”, says Hadow. 

Daniels added that when her colleagues left the tent to drill a few days into the wait, they came back feeling sick and wobbly and took longer than usual to warm up.  The team had no hot food for several days but are making up for it now – though for Hartley, the can of beer handed to him by one of the pilots has been the highlight of the re-supply.

“It feels ok to reflect on how bad it was now that we’re all ok”, he says.  “The last couple of days the lethargy got a hold.  All we wanted to do was lie down and do nothing, not even sleep.  But if I had to spend ten days in small tent with anyone, I’d choose my friends Ann and Pen”.