The sea ice is about two metres thick above frigid Arctic waters over 300 metres deep  - and we are camping on it!  It’s a strange sensation, knowing that there is nothing but frozen water between you, and water so cold it kills in less than four minutes.  This clearly had an effect on Martin, a Swedish photographer, who had a nightmare on his first night out on the ice.  ‘ I dreamed that my body heat was melting the ice underneath me and my sleeping bag was about to sink into the depths,’ he said, ‘I’m glad I woke up.’

 

We are camping in the Arctic wilderness, having joined an expedition to Canada run by Arctic Kingdom, specialising in Arctic dive trips.  It’s a fantastic opportunity to experience the beauty of the Arctic and to see polar bears, beluga, narwhals and Greenland sharks.

 

Leaving Ottawa in the throes of a sultry 28 degree heat wave, our next landing is at Iqualuit, some four hours later, where a quick foray outside into freezing temperatures for a cigarette, confirms our arrival in the  high arctic.  A couple of other stops in Nunavut, a Canadian Territory, home to the Inuit people and six hours after leaving Ottawa we land near the village of Arctic Bay where the temperature hovers around zero in the weak spring sunshine amid flurries of snow.

 

Everything that we will need for the next two weeks from shelter, food, and bedding to compressors, fuel and generators has to be taken with us.  The logistics are formidable, as we are venturing 100 miles out on to the sea ice.  Our destination is Lancaster Sound, near the spot where Sir John Franklin perished in 1847 with all his men in the search for the North West Passage.

 

Our first crack at a dive site starts with the largest Stihl chainsaw in the world, a 1.2 metre monster, Graham Dickson, expedition leader fires it up, a mad grin spreading across his face, as he does love his boy’s toys. Unfortunately, the easiest ice diving option was not to be, as after cutting three different holes near to an ice fracture beside camp it is clear that chainsaw is just not man enough to cut through the 2 metre thick ice.

 

We load all the gear, cameras, tanks, ropes, on to the komoteks or sleds and head off to our next dive site option  -  a lead, 10 km away.  A lead is a crack in the sea ice that has opened and frozen shut leaving an area where the ice is much thinner, such that we can break our own entry hole to the water. This is a serious overhead environment and safety and redundancy in our diving is critical.  ‘Everyone will be roped and dive in pairs initially, the second diver is responsible for signals to the rope tender on the surface.’ says Graham to groans from the photographers who hate both ropes and diving with a buddy, ’and if all goes well we’ll see about solo diving on the ropes. Compasses are unreliable this far north so don’t use them.’

 

The water is a cool minus 1.8 degrees C, as cold as sea water can get before freezing. ‘ I’ve never found the cold much of a problem,’ says Australian Kelvin Aitken, ‘ but then I do have a lot of natural insulation there,’ pointing to his belly and laughing, ‘anyway, your face goes numb as soon as you hit the water’.