British crew first to row to magnetic North Pole

WWF Canada

From www.rowtothepole.com

The final 50 mile leg of the expedition was a tale of two halves, beginning with a 48 mile forward surge by sea, and followed by an on-ice struggle to traverse a two mile ice field. Conditions were excellent as the crew began and made great progress as they rowed 40 miles through the Arctic night. With 10 miles to go, the ice grew denser and became progressively more difficult to navigate. The crew began celebrating the completion of their journey prematurely when, with two miles to go, a wall of ice blocked their passage and presented the crew with their final extreme polar challenge. The same winds that had cleared much of the route into Deer Bay had, ironically filled much of it with ice that had drifted in after days of battering winds. To finish the journey the crew had to use the one routine they had rehearsed the least – man-hauling the boat on its special runners over the ice.
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The crew has made the magnificent achievement of rowing 500 miles through Arctic waters. It is normal for Arctic pack ice to retreat each summer. What has become most striking in recent years is the accelerated rate of summer sea ice loss which has made this adventure possible.
The two mile long ice field had to be surmounted to achieve the expedition’s objective of becoming the first to complete a journey to a pole positioning by row boat. The OLD PULTENEY Ice Boat was perfectly designed to meet this challenge: Her cathedral hull has runners that allow her to be dragged like a sled. Even so, the two mile trek was an epic task for the exhausted crew as they dragged her over huge ice hillocks, through ice rubble and crumbling ice leads. The boat was heaved in-and-out of small ice breaks which provided brief respite until they encountered more ice rubble that once again blocked their path. Billy Gammon, a crew member and veteran ocean rower, referred to this stretch as…
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OePRlTtfRAk[/youtube]
The crossing took almost 10 hours as the crew dragged the 1.3 ton boat, arriving at the 1996 Magnetic North Pole at six thirty in the evening local time (0130 BST).
Having overcome a fortress of ice, the OLD PULTENEY ROW TO THE POLE crew have reached their destination, utterly exhausted and feeling they had given everything to do it. This voyage is the first polar rowing expedition since Antarctica 1916 when Sir Ernest Shackleton ordered the crew of the Endurance to their rowing boats to escape the pack ice that surrounded and crushed their ship. The crew have earned a small piece of adventure history for two significant achievements: (1) they are the first team to row to any pole position and (2) they have set a new gold-standard in ocean and endurance rowing.