Geographer and writer James Raffan has spent time every year since 1977 travelling in the North, by canoe, snowshoe, dogsled, snowmobile, eighteen-wheeler and foot. His previous ship assignment in the Northwest Passage, aboard the CCGS Pierre Radisson in 2003 for Up Here magazine, was nominated for a National Magazine Award. 

In 29 years of episodic Arctic wandering, Raffan has stayed fit travelling under his own steam. He was nearly undone, though, by the superb meals aboard the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent. Opportunities to exercise in the ship's gym were limited. "I used the NordicTrack, but with no experience on it and with the pitch of a moving ship on the high seas, I nearly killed myself," says Raffan. "Table tennis with photographer Benoit Aquin was a much safer option."

Raffan survived and returned to his home near Kingston, Ont., to work on his upcoming biography of Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson's Bay Company's trading territories from 1826 to 1860.