Our home for now is fit for the job; spacious, warm and tough (with a captain to match) and 160 feet of steel that could see off anything likely to be thrown at it. Very reassuring. But for all its old traditional sailing vessel looks, it was actually built in 1957 as a fishing boat and not given sails until 1998. Having a traditional Barkentine rig, the wind has to be strong enough and in the right direction for it to sail well, which given Sod's Law it rarely is. So a modern engine comes in handy. This is our self contained world, our castle, our protector, our cocoon. We'd be useless here without it.

Sitting on a hill above the anchorage I stretch out my arm and cover up the whole boat with my hand. World gone. I see nothing but the mountains, the glacier, floating chunks of ice -  just me, nothing else alive in sight. You're very aware of your body in a situation like that, aware of how fragile and vulnerable it can be and aware of your own psyche too when presented with, well, not a lot. You come face to face with yourself, like it or not.

It's easy to play at being an explorer here,  our high tech clothing keeps us well insulated and there's help on hand should we need it. The land must've looked much the same when these brave pioneering souls who first stepped foot here many years ago. I think of the technology they didn't have that we now take for granted. It was them and the environment and that was it, no satellites for communication, no helicopters, no Goretex.  The Canadian and Greenlandic Eskimos were even more incredible, surviving, no - thriving for generations with very little but their skills and ingenuity to cope with such extremities. I wonder at the skills and instincts now lost as we head back to our cosy boat for a cooked lunch.