The adven­tu­r­ers Bør­ge Ous­land and Mike Horn are back on solid ground. The rese­arch ship Lan­ce has rea­ched Lon­gye­ar­by­en on Satur­day and Ousland’s and Horn’s recent crossing of the Arc­tic Oce­an is thus finis­hed. They star­ted in Sep­tem­ber at 85 degrees north in the Bering Strait sec­tor of the Arc­tic Oce­an, which they had rea­ched with Horn’s sai­ling boat Pan­gaea. Horn and Ous­land pas­sed the north pole in Octo­ber. They spent 87 days in the ice, not inclu­ding the ship-based parts of the expe­di­ti­on.

The ori­gi­nal plan was to pick them up from the ice edge north of Spits­ber­gen with Pan­gaea, but the ope­ra­ti­on tur­ned out to be more chal­len­ging than expec­ted. As it tur­ned out, the ice-going Lan­ce went into the ice to meet the adven­tu­r­ers. Lan­ce had to move quite far into the drift ice and a heli­c­op­ter had to be used for the pick­up. Even Lan­ce was then not able to lea­ve the ice: the arri­val in Lon­gye­ar­by­en, ori­gi­nal­ly expec­ted around 10 Decem­ber, was final­ly last Satur­day, 28 Decem­ber, after about 3 weeks of being stuck in ice. A lot of manu­al work with sawing and car­ry­ing ice was done during attempts to get the ves­sel free. Out of 22 per­sons ori­gi­nal­ly on board, 3 were evacua­ted by heli­c­op­ter. Medi­cal reasons play­ed a role in this. Dyna­mi­te was reques­ted to blast the ship free when the heli­c­op­ter was sche­du­led, but the trans­port was final­ly refu­sed for safe­ty reasons.

Lan­ce in the ice. Pho­to © Eti­en­ne Cla­ret.

The expe­di­ti­on has drawn con­sidera­ble media atten­ti­on, both local­ly and bey­ond. Sval­bard­pos­ten was one of many media that cover­ed the expe­di­ti­on in some detail.