Finally managed to rent a snowmobile. I thought this would be an easy task, but it has taken me the whole two weeks to arrange! There are not many people here who rent out snowmobiles, and I kept on getting leads which did not work out. Eetuk Outfitting was supposed to have snowmobiles ready for today, but when I called yesterday they said it would be another couple of weeks.

As a last resort I called Qairrulik Outfitting (979-6280), as they advertised in some of the tourist information, although no-one had mentioned this possibility to me. They said they had one available, and with some difficulty I found their garage, in the Arctic Cat building between the Legion and the Legislative Assembly.

They were very kind and helpful, if a little reluctant to rent one of their machines out to someone with no previous experience. Eventually they got a machine working and gassed up, and I was on my way! This was more difficult than I expected. The steering only works if you are moving forward at reasonable speed, a bit like having way on a boat. The accelerator is a push lever on the handlebars, as is the brake. It feels so much like a motorbike, I was expecting to rotate the handlebar to accelerate, and to have a bicycle type brake lever. There are, fortunately, no gears (although sometimes a reverse gear would have been useful). There is a car-type ignition switch and a lawn-mower type pull start. The heated handlebars were a pleasant and unexpected bonus.

Riding it was cold, as I expected, but also very bumpy and very noisy. The tracks are quite irregular, and you need to keep up a reasonable speed to steer over them. However, once away from the shore, on the flat ice of the bay, its much easier as you can go in a straight line over level ice.

Me on a skidoo
A collection of skidoos in the bay	Start of a skidoo race