After four nights of waiting for the ice to melt at Graham Harbour we lifted the hook and set sail for Gascoyne Inlet forty miles to the west. All is well on board our good ship and the topic of the day was the consumption of biscuits and where they are all going?!! As you can imagine five healthy adults with good appetites with nothing much to do other than pass the time waiting for the blinking ice to melt can be a formidable challenge. Biscuits ashore at Arctic Bay and Pond Inlet dithered between $8-10 Canadian and a Mars Bar was $4 around Canadian and they get snapped up quiet suddenly around here especially when the Rice brothers are sharing the same watch in the middle of the night! After a two hour long meeting today with all present we decided that Cath and I will bake cookies every other day or so a much cheaper option since we have plenty of ingredients on board. Cath is our main baker and has been all along baking breads, flapjacks, cakes and yesterday pancakes for lunch!

Our Chief Steward Philip will arrange to divide the offerings into five plastic containers labelled  with crew member names. We can all then decide all  when we want to chomp away! Captain Dai produced a tasty seafood paella that was enjoyed by all and Chief Steward Phill produced a bar of chocalate to go with the 12th cup of tea of the day, nice move Phil, he is the only one that really knows how many bars are left and he has hid them well somewhere on board!

Our radio man Pete was able to contact a French sailing vessel tonight also trying to sail the North West Passage to discuss ice conditions from their updated ice reports in French! The only bit I understood was merci beacoup!

Its all good nd al in all we have had a good dayon board.

Birds sighted today were Thick Billed Murres ,Long Tailed Jaegers, Arctic Skuas, Northern Fulmars, Black Guillemots and are beloved Northern Fulmars who keep watch over us always flying around us in a very friendly way.

Last night on my anchor watch between 2-4 a.m. here at Gascoyne Inlet 74.39 North and 91.17 West North just four miles east ot of Beechy Island there was a salmon pink, grey sky, and the wind from the east at around  fiftenn knots and a bit of a lumpy sea. We endure the sweet melodious sounds of snoring all around and making sure the anchor does not drag when on anchor watch! The hillsides around this large bay are more rounded than anything we have seen this far north. A few abrupt steep cliffs interrupt the lonely, majestic landscape where many thousand Northern Fulmars are nesting. We were hoping to visit Beechy Island this morning but due to the wind and sea conditions we are staying snugged up aboard Catryn. Hopefully tomorrow morning when the winds abate we will sail the four miles west to Erebus and Terror Bay where the Franklin expedition wintered over in 1845, a mere hundred and sixty nine years ago! There are five graves ashore  one is unmarked, one is Thomas Morgan of HMS Investigator, William Braine, John Hartnell and John Harrington who were crew members aboard the Franklin expedition. The graves were all exhumed in  1981 and the bodies were found to be preserved by the permafrost. (From Farley Mowatts book Ordeal by Ice). Today it is thought that the lead from the plumbing on board both ships contributed to the deaths of the whole crew and not so much of lead the soldering of the cans of food. I believe that conclusion has been based on the level of lead that was present in the found bodies.

There are a few memorials dedicated to the Franklin expedition that includes a wooden cenotaph that is badly scarred by the claws of Polar Bears and scattered rusted out barrel staves and tin cans and odd bits of coal hanging around. There are replica boards on the gravesites to identify the inhabitants and the original ones are in the Prince of Wales Museum in Yellowknife.

Bitterly cold here this afternoon and it snowed this morning,

Pnawn da (good afternoon) to you all.

Hywel.