The day began in hunger. Our hotel cook overslept. Not a sniff of breakfast, so we retreated upstairs in hunger to the hotel lounge. To pass time while the cook awoke, we held an ex tempore Expedition strategy meeting; the time was not wasted!

Today's task was to pack the food. Our guiding principal is to make life on the pack-ice straightforward: we'll need to be able to find what we need, when we need it, and quickly. We batched the food rations into day-bags per man, and weighed everything to the gram. For each day there will be one breakfast bag, one ski-lunch bag and one evening-meal bag. In addition, we have purchased pre-packed lunch rations.

This method of packaging has several advantages. It enables us to exclude all non-essential packaging materials from the outset: no waste will be left behind us, except human footprints and spoor. In addition, it removes the temptation to change our planned diet along the way: we did not come here for a culinary experience, but to ski to the North Pole! The essential thing is that our daily energy intake is sufficient.

Medically, the Expedition members are suffering from a whole range of minor symptoms, from aching muscles and bones to headaches. As treatment, we're trying to rest up as much as possible.

We seem to have no difficulty falling asleep at night: this is partly due to jetlag.

In the evening, we again went out skiing in the strong winds to test our equipment. Once again, the hoods on our Sasta anoraks proved invaluable.

Forced by events, we also began testing our in-tent clothing: it was so cold in our hotel this evening that we watched TV wearing our camping fleeces!

All is well with the Expedition.