One Big Apology and some Answers to your Questions

First the big apology. Many of you faithful readers have been posting questions, comments, and offers to help.  But we have not been good about responding. And in many cases due to a technical glitch, we weren’t even aware of your messages.  Sorry!

To make it up to you, we are going to try and respond to as many questions as we can.  Right here, right now. The full crew is involved so this should be interesting. Here goes:

Do we melt ice for drinking water?  Yes!  Old ice is lovely, whether used in kids drinks or adults, or just for hydration.  New ice can be a little salty, but we still use it sometimes as ice in the cooler.  We also catch rain water, and yesterday’s rain filled up our tanks.  And sometimes we steal pond water from reindeer, and heat it up to take showers in.

Is the ice different colors? Yes, some is electric blue (Talia says the prettiest color she has ever seen) although not all of them are as pretty as the blues and greens.  There are also greys, browns, and cream colors.  Even black dirty ones that look like they have been rolled in mud.

Do we want ice updates from your plane?  YES Please!  I emailed a generous pilot separately about that, but thanks for responding!  And we so appreciate all other offers of help!  We have had so much wonderful support along the way.

Have we seen dolphins or Narwhals or Beluga?  Yes on Dolphins and pilot whales and porpoise, bowhead, gray, Cei, and humpback whales.  But we have to get deeper into the NW Passage for the others, we think.  We did see a reindeer herd yesterday though.  Honest!

 

Can we upload drone footage of us navigating through ice?  Yes, when we have the bandwidth.  For short snips, you might want to follow John’s Instagram posts @john_t._guillote. He is the man behind our eye in the sky!

How often do we go ashore?  Not every day, but we try to visit every place we stop.  And if we are stopped, someone usually wants to go ashore to take photos, exercise, or look for food of some sort.  Some places, we feel like we spend too much time ashore.  (Sorry, Nome. Wonderful people though!)

Do we see a lot of human footprints and trash on the beaches?  Human footprints, no.  Lots of bear tracks, reindeer tracks, goose and other sea bird tracks everywhere.  Trash, sadly, is also everywhere.  We try to pick it up when we can, but Dogbark can only carry so much foam (from egg mattresses, housing insulation, etc.), old clothes, boots, stoves, rundown buildings, tarps, water bottles, and other flotsam.  We thought it would be cleaner here, but the impact of our waste seems to be everywhere we turn.

What does 7/10ths ice mean?  We don’t want to know!  It is more ice than we want to try and pass, that’s for sure.  But the ice charts we look at refer to ice by % of sea coverage, so 7/10ths would look like water mostly covered by large, immovable objects.  5/10ths was as much as we have seen, and we got out of there as fast as we could with some help from our flying eyeball.  See Dogbark’s Facebook page for a quick snippet of less dangerous ice.

Did we feel the earthquake?  Thankfully no.  But we did hear from a knowledgeable source that it may have affected sea floor areas around us.  We don’t trust our charts much anyway, but now we will be extra careful.

Is it easy to catch fish?  Ha!  As someone who has spent most of my life trying and often failing to catch them, I have to come clean and say no, it is anything but easy.  The only proven way to succeed is to just keep fishing.  Even the blind squirrel can find a nut someday, as my granddad used to say.  Unless you are in Nome, of course, during a humpy (pink) salmon run.  Then anyone can do it.  Even you, Jake!  We are still eating smoked salmon from fish we smoked along the way, but we are really hoping we can start catching some fresh char.  In fact, I might have to go fishing today!