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IT MUST be tough being Arctic adventurer Antony Jinman.

You can keep a lookout for hungry Polar bears. And you can pile on the layers against the brain-numbing cold.

How on God’s snowy Earth, though, does the Plymothian handle the bitter frustration of being only the South West’s third-most famous Polar explorer?

That challenge won’t ever kill him – but could prove fatal to his expedition plans.

In the queue for sponsorship he’s behind Sir Ranulph Fiennes, of Somerset, and Dartmoor’s Pen Hadow, two veterans with international reputations.

“Polar exploration is very friendly,” says Antony. “Pen has always helped me out with advice – but exploration is also very competitive. Nobody is going to give away the ‘trade secrets’ of how to get funding.

“Pen and Ran became the big names that they are by making small steps at a time,” he says. “In the last three years I’ve done nine expeditions, which have all been successful in their goals – but they are about education and inspiration as well.”

Which is why the 28-year-old has set up Education Through Expeditions with the help of city solicitors Ashfords and the University of Plymouth.

The not-for-profit company, endorsed with a letter of support by the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the right to education, Vernor Munoz, is designed to link communities all around the world providing information on widely varying environments and giving real-time insights.

“An isolated community on a Pacific island that is threatened by rising sea levels can speak directly by satellite phone to an explorer in Greenland who can tell them about the melting ice which is making the sea level rise,” says Antony, giving an example.

Antony will be adding to his experience and gathering scientific data for the University next month on his next expedition, skiing to the geographic North Pole.

Meanwhile, he is also working hard on plans for a trip to the far south of the globe that will take him in the footsteps of an adventurer whose fame eclipses even Fiennes and Hadow.

The aim is to mount an expedition to Antarctica in 2012 to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Britain’s greatest Polar explorer, and one of Plymouth’s most famous sons.

The story of Scott’s heroic but ill-fated return trip from the South Pole fired Antony’s imagination as a lad.

“My dad had books on Scott and (fellow Polar explorer) Ernest Shackleton with fantastic photos of Antarctica,” says Antony. “He’d talk about those stories and, after a Sunday roast at my grandparents’ farm on Dartmoor, he’d drag me out for hikes on the moor.

“That’s what got me going. I always wanted to become an expedition leader and follow in Scott’s footsteps.”

As a teenager at Plymstock School, Antony was no star in the classroom. He struggled academically and later found out that he is dyslexic.

But outdoors he shone. The grit, drive and determination that got him through Duke of Edinburgh Award expeditions and the Ten Tors – his team was one of the few that completed the gruelling Dartmoor challenge in 1996, when the majority of competitors were pulled out because of snow – showed he was a leader who pushed on when the going changed from tough to treacherous.

Antony plotted a route through the military into a career as an explorer. He did a public services course at City College Plymouth, served in the Territorial Army and spent 18 months in the Royal Navy which included a training stint in Norway.

The Navy was ‘fantastic but not for me’ so in 2003 Antony set about getting experience out of uniform. He worked for three years for Explore Worldwide on adventure trips ranging from driving huskies in Sweden to taking visitors up Africa’s highest peak, Kilimanjaro.

He then completed an international mountain leader’s course in North Wales. “I have been an expedition leader ever since,” says Antony.

“I split my time roughly equally between Plymouth and the Arctic. I spend a lot of time on Baffin Island in Canada where the Inuit live. It’s an area twice the size of the UK but with a population of only 25,000.”

There, and in Greenland, he has carried out summer and winter expeditions, including solo trips, in some of the most inhospitable conditions on Earth, down to minus 40C.

Those bitter winter conditions mask an alarming upward trend in temperatures – climate change caused mainly by mankind’s burning of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas.

“Living in cities here we don’t notice the impact that we are having on the rest of the world,” says Antony. “You see it in front of you in a place like Baffin Island. Earth’s climate has changed naturally through millions of years but the rate of change that is happening now is totally different.

“An Inuit hunter was telling me the other day that he was having to use a boat to go hunting because the sea still wasn’t frozen even though it’s January.

“He said that has never happened before. During the summer things are getting warmer and in the winter the ice is coming later. The Inuit are very worried.”

Antony will get a close look again next month on the trip to the North Pole, his most ambitious expedition to date.

The Plymouth man will join Canadian Sarah MacNair and Australian Linda Beilharz on the 470-mile trek pulling sledges to the far north.

On the way Antony will drill into the ice to collect samples of algae. University scientists in Plymouth will analyse the tiny plants, which offer clues about historical climate conditions.

The team has to reach the pole by late April so the trio can be airlifted by a Russian scientific party, which leaves the ice at the end of the Arctic winter.

Conditions will be horrendous. “There will be 24-hour darkness at the start and temperatures down to minus 50C – that will feel even colder with the wind chill,” says Antony.

“There are Polar bears to watch out for and the danger of falling through thin ice – the ice piles up and cracks in pressure ridges where ice sheets push against each other.” At such low temperatures, electronic safety and navigation equipment can fail and even a simple task such as taking a photo is a dangerous and involved exercise.

“Batteries won’t work at those temperatures so you have to keep them next to your skin for warmth,” says Antony. “To take a photo you have to take your mitts off, leaving only a lining layer mitt thin enough to handle things, reach under your clothing for the batteries, put them in the camera, take off the lens cap, pose, take your photo, take out the batteries, put them back under your jacket, put your mitts back on and do all that quickly: skin freezes in one minute at minus 40C.

“Even if you are quick you get awful pain in your fingers as the cold starts to seize your joints. You warm your hands up between your legs and then you get excruciating pain as the feeling comes back.”

The current cold snap offers Antony the chance to make his training in Devon a little more realistic. “This weather is perfect for me,” he says. “Every day in the office I’m itching to get out – I’m out on Dartmoor most nights hauling tyres behind me for up to five hours.”

The North Pole trek was planned to be part of a record-breaking series. He hoped to become the first Briton to cross Greenland and reach both poles inside a year.

But the trip to the South Pole is now on hold as he concentrates on the Scott memorial expedition.

The aim is to reach the spot where Scott died on his way back from the Pole in 1912. The Plymouth adventurer’s team reached the southernmost spot on Earth to find the honour of being the first people to the South Pole had gone to Norwegian Roald Amundsen’s party 35 days earlier.

Two of the British team lost their lives on the return leg and Scott and his two remaining colleagues – Lieutenant Henry Bowers and Dr Edward Wilson – froze to death, trapped in their tent in a blizzard, when they ran out of fuel and food. They were just 11 miles from a supply dump.

Antony has been in contact with Dr David Wilson – great nephew of Dr Edward Wilson, the Scott expedition’s medical officer – who is chairman of the centenary commemorations.

Antony aims to lead a Plymouth team across the ice to the site of the camp. There they will be met by relatives of those who lost their lives on the Scott expedition, who will be flown in for a memorial service.

“It will be a great honour to go in the footsteps of my hero,” said Antony. “Scott is so inspirational because he was not just interested in being the first to do something. It was about discovery and bringing information back to the rest of the world. His was a scientific expedition.

“That’s what I aim to do through Education Through Expeditions.”

Antony hopes other Plymouth organisations will seize the chance to get involved and add to the ‘fantastic’ support he already enjoys from the university, which provides his base in the city.

“2012 is also the 150th anniversary of the Plymouth School of Navigation. So many pioneers and explorers have left from the city – Sir Francis Drake, the Pilgrim Fathers, Scott. This is an opportunity to scream and shout about Plymouth’s history and what we have going for us here.”

And Antony is ready to risk his life doing so.

“There is always an element of risk in Polar expeditions but this is what I do,” says Antony.

Back at home his family are left worrying every time Antony heads off to the Polar regions. His dad, David, is a carpenter, mum Janet is the kitchen manager at Plymstock School and younger brother Andrew is a computer graphics designer.

He accepts that they are constantly concerned, but they have to understand that Antony is doing what he loves.

“I know they worry about me but I work and plan hard to reduce the risk. People say that I must have got used to the cold but you don’t, not cold like that.

“It’s a battle every day, getting everything right. There is nothing heroic about getting frostbite – if that happens you are getting it wrong.”

But, bizarrely, one of the principal hazards in deep sub-zero conditions is getting too warm.

“You mustn’t sweat, because if sweat gets into your down jacket it freezes, you lose the insulation – and you die. Survival is about getting your body temperature right with layers that you can add or take off.”

There is, though, that more mundane worry he faces at home in balmy Plymouth before he sets off: the constant quest for financial support.

Antony was lucky to be supported by a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship which helped fund a 150km trip across Baffin Island last year.

But in chasing contributions from the private sector Antony faces a Catch 22: until he becomes more famous he will always struggle to finance his expeditions – and he can only become better known if he goes on ever-more-expensive treks. He is still about £20,000 short of the £60-70,000 he needs to finance the Arctic adventure with the days ticking away to the start. “I’m optimistic I’ll make it,” he says.

Antony has, though, what might prove to be a trump card. He is too nice a guy to point it out, but one unique selling point is that he isn’t a Pen or a Ranulph. He’s an ordinary bloke from Plymouth who the rest of us, young and old, can identify with.

Posted 17 January 2010