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Well who'd have thunk it? Certainly not that dingy salesman back in Vancouver who told us last year (when his laughter subsided) that "What do two little Aussies know about ice?". Here we are, safe and sound, in Cambridge Bay, Victoria Island in the Canadian Arctic – stage 2 of our adventure complete, and none too soon!

We sent the last update tucked away in that little anchorage in SE Victoria Island, and the next day we up-anchored early and - using every hour of the rapidly reducing daylight - sailed to the disconcertingly uncharted but very beautiful Anderson Bay, our second last stop. We cautiously nestled close in to the windward shore, and dropped the anchor through 15 feet of crystal clear water onto blue-white sand. It was already getting late, but we quickly flipped our dingy over the side and rowed ashore to explore at sunset.

A weird kitten-like meowing turned out to be coming from an adorable little arctic fox apparently calling to us from across a dry riverbed. We edged closer, returning his meows, expecting him to flee at each step, but instead he waited for us, bobbing his head and bouncing impatiently around until we were right in front of him. I'd forgotten how cute these things are. At last, when he'd apparently had enough of our attempts to maintain his curiosity with silly noises, he vanished down a hole we hadn't seen, and that was that.

Next morning we woke to find ice all over the deck and filling the crevices in our sail cover - definitely time to get a move on. It was a short, cold, and rather foggy sail from Anderson Bay to the final cape, but as we rounded it into Cambridge Bay the fog gradually lifted and the tight clutter of houses shimmered into view through the mirage. It was a long convoluted path in, through countless leads and marker buoys, giving us plenty of time to get excited about finally reaching the end of this year's adventure! Cambridge Bay is like my second home - I've been here five times now, and with so many good friends to see, and to introduce Jess too, we could hardly wait.

So a bit after lunch on Wednesday 31st August we dropped our sail for the last time just short of the wharf, and tonk-tonk tonked alongside, casting our lines right into the waiting hands of two of my good friends: Doug Stern (the 'white Inuit' ranger who has spent a good deal of his years living off the land), and Colin Dickie (now jokingly known as the 'whale hunter' after he accidently caught a narwhal in his seal net the other day, much to the delight of the local hunters!). Still in total disbelief that our engine made it this far, I gently shut it off, gave it a pat, and we hopped ashore. By now other friends had turned up, and between doing guided tours onboard Teleport, we briefly met David Cowper on his yellow tug-like motorboat 'Polar Bound' before he cast off and choofed off to continue his Northwest Passage journey five minutes later.

Before we'd even had a chance to take up Colin's offer of a hot shower, Doug told us that a pod of Narwhals (unicorn whales) had been spotted in the bay, so we promptly piled into his dingy and took off, cameras at the ready. "Here, put one of these under you…" He said, tossing Jess and I what looked disconcertingly like a dead duck to sit on. "They're Loons," He explained casually as Jess arranged the corpse so the bird's head dangled off the front of the seat and the feet hung off the back, "stuffed with Muskox wool." I have to admit, they were by far the warmest, and featheriest cushions I have ever sat on. The whales were nowhere to be seen, and eventually we came back to shore. "Come to dinner if you don't have other plans?" Doug offered, and after we agreed wholeheartedly, he informed us that he was having his favorite – Caribou head. Yum-o!

So after enjoying a hot shower at Colin's (thanks!), catching up with his lovely daughter Cassandra, and playing with their newborn sled dog pups, we headed back to Doug's museum-like house, adorned with countless antlers, skulls and other bones on the roof, and crammed full inside with collections of everything from inflated, seed-filled ptarmigan crops (a traditional house welcoming adornment), bear claws, rainbow-inducing prisms, walls of books and posters of deep-space. Despite having expanded his house and guiltily connected up to town power at last, I was glad to see he was still every-bit the Doug I remembered being so inspired by back in 2005 when he generously lent Clark and I his incredible house to base our island crossing expedition from. Doug had thankfully already eaten most of the brain and the eyes from the caribou head simmering in the pot on the stove, so we escaped lightly, chewing on a hunk of cheek and tongue. "I'm impressed!" He said, nodding encouragingly, "It took me a couple of years before I could eat that kinda food."

Next morning it was blowing hard, snowing pellets of ice/rain, and some of the puddles were already starting to freeze over. We spent the next few days catching up with old friends including my other arctic mentor Brent Boddy (who's dog sledded to the North Pole without resupply), eating Char, and working out how to go about building a cradle to lift Teleport into for the winter – the wood for which our good mate Wilf had already brought in for us.

We awoke one morning to urgent Russian voices, and peeping blearily through our window, we saw what appeared to be a makeshift castaway's raft, tying up to the wharf beside us. It was made of what looked like bamboo poles, lashed with string and duct-tape, two diesel engines mounted on the back, with a small tent underneath a precarious A-frame structure in the middle. On top of this hung a shabby sail and a … a radar dome. With absolutely no idea what to make of it, I hurried out to help take the lines of these poor shipwreck survivors. It turned out, amazingly, that these guys were actually in the process of circumnavigating the arctic in stages onboard this crazy raft, and had already successfully navigated the Northeast passage above Russia several years ago, had now just about done the Northwest passage, and were just a few weeks away from continuing on to Alaska and ultimately back to Russia. Just awesome. And we thought we were doing it tough aboard our little boat! These guys don't even have a heater!

They stayed only long enough to refuel and enjoy a hearty steak dinner at the local Elks here (a kinda membership-based, non-for-profit pub that opens here some Fridays, raising money for various causes.) The food was amazing, and afterwards, it just so happened that the town was having something called a 'Beer Dance'! Our mate Wilf managed to drum us up some tickets, and boy did we have a good time – a bit like a blue-light disco but all ages, finishing up at about 2AM (or was it 3 AM?!) The whole town was rather quiet the next morning, and while having a shower at the local RCMP (Police) station (we were invited, not detained, amazingly) we learnt that these Beer Dances are actually a rather rare occurrence, only held a couple of times a year. Good times

And so the days slid happily past. We saw the faint shimmering green curtains of the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis); We went out with our friends Keith Lear (both junior and senior) to check their fishing nets across the bay, and untangled and filleted 16 huge char; we ate muskox tongue with Doug; huge Sunday roasts at Wilfs, dried char and we even ate muktuk (whale skin – in this case Narwhal skin) both raw, and also some cooked into a salad that Brent's lovely partner Jeanie prepared for dinner. Cooked it tasted good, however raw I thought it was a bit like attempting to chew on a cold, fishy-smelling strip of car tire – in the end I had to give up and just swallow each little piece whole.

There's been a constant parade of cargo and tanker ships resupplying Cambridge Bay these past two weeks, and onboard one Brent took delivery of a little 17 foot sailing/rowing boat which Jess and I helped him rig. I then went out with him on its maiden voyage (drysuited up), and the following day helped him sail it the 9 miles around to his great little cabin out of town. Clara, the wonderfully friendly girl at the local visitors center here kindly lent us two bikes, and so by cycling and sailing and even the odd jog, we've been trying to burn off some of the calories we've accumulated while being stuck aboard Teleport these past months.

Another yacht turned up here also, 'Roxane' with two hilarious French chaps onboard who we instantly befriended. Luc (who's sailing website is here) and Gildas, is quite a well known artist in France, and determined to see muskox to draw, we borrowed two ATV (All Terrain Vehicles – or 'quads') from some friends and zoomed out of town to Mount Pelly, climbed to the top and convinced ourselves that we could almost see a herd of them in the distance through the cascading snow/rain/ice. What followed was an exciting afternoon of extreme ATV-ing up/over/through/around and into hills of boulders, mud, tussocks and more, as we wound our way towards nowhere, eventually opting to continue on foot so as to leave some petrol for the trip home. We failed to find any muskox, but succeeded in the larger goal, which was of course basically to have fun.

In between all of this, Jess and I spent several days on our own constructing the epic cradle for Teleport just behind Wilf's place, following the measurements I took from Teleport's cradle back in Halifax I recorded before we left. With the help of a brand new chainsaw he'd kindly organised for us, we transformed the huge pile of lumber (8x8 inch beams, 10x2 inch planks etc) into all the pieces we needed. Our mate good ol' Rene Laserich (Adlair Aviation pilot and son of the legendary bush pilot Willie Laserich who picked Clark and I up in 2005) lent us his impact-driver from the hangar, and a friend of Wilfs gave us hundreds of good strong bolts to hold it all together. "That's funny!" Wilf laughed as he saw me reading the operating manual for the chainsaw (I'd never used one before), "You come all the way to the arctic where there's no trees to learn how to use a chainsaw!"

At last we got it finished, the final piece of the puzzle being making four adjustable pads to ultimately securely hold the boat in place – comprising of four lengths of seriously thick threaded-rod that adjustably sleeve back into a length of tube that some locals kindly welded onto a backing plate for us. It was good fun actually, trying to source all these little pieces and design the cradle with what we could get – and as everyone's so amazingly friendly here in Cambridge Bay, we pieced it together with bits of tubing from behind workshops, large nuts from the airport, and other bits from everywhere else in town. An extra-huge thanks however to Wilf Macdonald, who not only somehow brought in all the wood for us, but lent us all his power tools, his yard to build it in, his advice, his contacts, and all the while kept us well fed and in good company.

Early the next morning, another friend, Cory, shackled our giant sled-like structure up behind his brand new truck (fresh off the cargo ship) and dragged it out of town to the place where we hoped to have Teleport lifted onto it, leaving a trail of little toothpicks behind as the bottom ½ inch of the wooden runners gradually wore away on the gravel roads. The locals use it as a natural boat-ramp area, as the water is very deep (100 feet!) right up close to the shore, where it then quickly shoals to nothing in about 10 feet.

Organizing the crane was a challenge in itself. Eventually we managed to talk to the right chap, Alex at 'Kitnuna Construction', who informed us that yes, there was a crane that should be able to lift Teleport, but it hadn't been run for a year or so. They dug it out – smashed windows and all - from the line of abandoned-looking earth-moving equipment on the foreshore and managed to get it working. It leaked coolant however, so they kept topping it up with more as the beast slowly crawled out to the site on the day of the lift.

We cast-off from the wharf, and accompanied by the French yachtie Luc, motored around to the site, gingerly coming underneath the crane's outstretched arm and grasping the dangling spreader bars (which they'd welded together especially for us) before shutting of our engine and wriggling the two giant webbing slings underneath our hull, all the while drifting around and banging (gently) aground on the edge of the deep-water shelf. I'd already worked out the different lengths required for the bow and stern slings by dangling a rope weighted-down with a big shifting-spanner under our hull back at the wharf, and so once we finally got the slings in place and tensioned up, Teleport was held wonderfully level and snug.

With the memory of the webbing slippage that plunged Teleport a couple of feet splashing back into the water when the crane lifted us out briefly in Nuuk (Greenland) still fresh in my mind, I asked if the crane chappy could boom-out a little further and lift us over deeper water, just in case we needed some splash-depth, because as it was we were actually aground and any slight drop would have been catastrophic. They agreed, and poled us out a little further and began the hoist. Suddenly, Jess (safely ashore), spotted that the back foot of the crane was actually lifting off the ground (ie the whole crane was starting to overbalance forward! Yikes!), and so rather quickly the operator lowered Teleport back in again and all of us ummed and arghed for a while before agreeing to boom-in attempt the lift closer in (making the crane more stable) but over worryingly shallow water. Everything looked snug, and so the rest of us rowed ashore and committed to the lift.

It went like clockwork – up she went, and hanging onto a rope tied to the bow, I lead Teleport around like a dog on a leash, swinging her gently around over and down into our waiting cradle. Perfect! We got plenty of good photos – even the crane operator paused from time to time to lean out past the shattered windows and take a clear photo himself too! What a relief! Thanks very much to Alex and his team, and 'merci beacoup' to you too Luc!

We spent the next two days winterizing Teleport – flushing the engine's cooling with fresh water and then draining it completely; emptying our water tanks and plumbing; draining the toilet etc (as when water freezes as you know it expands, and will damage – if not burst – whatever it's contained in). We took the blades off our awesome wind turbine (as some of the bored kids here have already taken to throwing stones at the irresistibly spinning blades, unfortunately chipping them), we've boarded up the windows with plywood (again, against stones), and taken off the batteries to store in a safe dry warm storage area (along with all our valuable electronics etc). We're next going to wrap Teleport in multiple tarps, and then gently drag her (on the cradle) higher up the hill out of reach of sea ice and snow drifts.

With Teleport decommissioned for the winter, we've very happily taken up Keith and Patricia Lear's generous offer to stay at their house until we leave. They are the loveliest of people (Both Newfoundlanders, as it so often turns out with many of the friendliest people we meet), and we've been absolutely loving it here – hot showers, huge soft bed, endless supply of coffee – the lot!

Just yesterday a big coast guard ship came into the bay to pick up the channel marker buoys for the winter (else they'd be dragged away by the sea ice!), and all the puddles in town and even some of the smaller lakes are freezing over. We're in the process of organizing our flights home with Air Canada, and hope to be back in the glorious Aussie Springtime around 28th September.

Sorry this update's taken me a while to sent-out – we've just been so busy! We love it here – Northern Canada truly is such a wonderful place to experience – the land, the people, the culture, the wildlife – it's all so welcoming and unforgettable – if you haven't been, come! Already we can't wait to return next year (early July?) and continue the adventure! If we come a little early (mid / late June?) we'll even be able to fit in a little kite-skiing with Brent and enjoy the thaw and a few extra weeks with friends!

I've also gone back and added photos to the last few updates that I was only able to send out with one photo at the time, so go and have a look at them too! They are the Into the Northwest Passage - Bears, Killer Whales etc and Change of Plans! and Jess's Update updates.

Thanks again everyone for sharing in our adventure – what an experience we've had hey – I hope you enjoyed the pics and updates, and it seems from many of your messages that it's encouraged a few of you to get out and challenge yourself also, which is fantastic! Apart from Greenland, we were definitely let off lightly in the Northwest Passage section with virtually no ice (turns out this has been the lowest ice year in record!), but I'd just like to stress before we sign off here that although our updates always sound so positive and casual, sailing in this part of the world is not something to be taken lightly – ice is certainly not the only danger, and I have to admit that this sailing trip was far more stressful than anything I've ever done before. The combination of ice, unpredictable and often ferocious weather, poorly marked charts, complete isolation and self-reliance, and an ever approaching seasonal deadline, all mixed together with maintenance problems and the lack of sleep that comes with keeping a proper full-time lookout with a crew of only 2, especially on such a small and relatively fragile yacht – all makes for a mighty challenging and downright frightening undertaking. This part of the world is just so unforgiving. That said, the rewards of traveling here, and (as my Dad says of sailing, 'the freedom to make personally significant decisions everyday'), makes it all so worth while – so long as you take it very seriously, plan everything properly and do everything in your power to reduce the rather high risks down to an acceptable level. Even then, we're fully aware you can never reduce these risks completely – you'll remember the lovely British couple Les and Ali who we met in Nuuk, Greenland, who helped us out with fixing our engine (who've spent their whole lives sailing - indeed Les is even an examiner for the ultimate 'Yachtmaster' sailing qualification, and Ali skippered the round-the-world Clipper race), we were devastated to learn just a few weeks ago that they tragically lost their yacht in a storm soon after we parted ways in Greenland – thankfully they both survived.

We'll keep the website posted with news as we gear up for next year, and of course the video updates from this trip as we finish them! Thanks too to Thandi from Postmedia News who did an interview with us the other day, the article from which has just been published right across Canada in like 12+ newspapers! =)

Cheerio,

Chris and Jess.