A properly tough day today (not that we've ever had an easy one here) so we were over the moon to see nearly 30km when we checked the score on the GPS this evening.

Yesterday's ideal conditions blew away overnight and we woke up to a very odd morning. There was a slight breeze, which later in the day would become a full-blast headwind, the sort of wind that in London would flip umbrellas inside-out, and blow over those A-shaped signs in the street. The temperature when we left the tent this morning wouldn't impress many people in the pub: it was precisely zero degrees centigrade, and a fearsome -2 degrees C. windchill. I suspect many people in the UK had a colder start to the day than that, though it felt like the windchill got back to some semi-respectable double figures in the afternoon and Tarka certainly had ice in his beard to show for it.

We've been sent a stack of questions and I'm going to answer a couple now:

Q) (From Perran) I'd love to learn a little more about the blog process - what exactly is involved in the tent at the end of the day in producing the blog, selecting a photo and getting it sent back to the UK?

A) It all starts with the 'tech bag' and the Pilot. The tech bag is a padded drybag that comes into the tent each night and contains our ultrabook (a Sony 11" Vaio Pro), four 58Wh lithium polymer battery packs, our Iridium Extreme satellite phone, our Iridium NAL Shout Nano tracker, something we call 'Simon's box' (a sort of junction box made by Intel for all the cables we have that lets us charge several things at once), a charger for our camera batteries and a load of leads to connect everything together. The Pilot is our modified Iridium OpenPort Pilot satellite transmitter, that lives in the back of Tarka's sled. Originally designed for boats and ships to have global internet access, ours is about half its original weight thanks to a customised plastic housing and some new internal parts, the 'below decks unit' has been stripped down and attached to the base of the Pilot, along with a tiny wifi router. There's a three-metre siliconised low-temperature power cable that comes into the tent. As soon as we get organised in the tent, whoever's not cooking opens the tech bag and starts to warm everything up. Now it's relatively pleasant this just means laying it out on top of a sleeping bag, but back at the start in the minus thirties and forties, it meant ramming batteries into pockets, the Ultrabook into the sleeping bag with you and the phone into your pants. Once we've fired up the Ultrabook (which is remarkably efficient), I write the blog post in a text editor (WordPad) before copying and pasting it into the html form we use to upload it. We take the SD card out of whoever's camera took photos that day, plug it into the Ultrabook, choose a photo, resize it slightly (we're sending them back at 1024 pixels wide, usually about 250kb each although video and some of the higher resolution images are larger) and save it to a specific folder. Once everything's ready to go, we plug two of the battery packs (we start charging these from the solar panels as soon as we get in the tent) into Simon's box, and then plug the power cord from the Pilot into the box as well, which boots it up and creates a wifi hotspot in our tent. Then it's as simple as going online, sending the text, photos and video back, and checking the expedition email account. 

Q) (From Adam) How and where did you and Tarka first meet?

A) I think it was about 10 years ago . Tarka had contacted me for advice on the Arctic Ocean as he was planning an unsupported North Pole attempt from Canada the next year. He cycled a surprisingly long distance over to my flat in Putney on a bike he'd built himself from parts he'd found on a scrap heap in order to have a chat over a cup of tea and we hit it off straight away.

Last up, a belated happy birthday to Alastair Humphreys for yesterday.

And I gather we've had loads of penguin name suggestions. The team in London are going to dig out a prize (a Scott Expedition t-shirt) for the winner to be announced early next week. Watch this space...