Beautiful skies morning and night

 

I am charged-up about electric chainsaw

 

MSA 60 Stihl is now my go-to chainsaw

I just came inside after a morning of clearing survey lines with my battery electric chainsaw. At just eight pounds, this 12-inch bar saw by Stihl is just a pleasure to operate. It cuts quickly and quietly. After about 1 1/2 hours of sawing through downed poplars and balsam and upright alders and willows it still was only half discharged.

Up at the cabin I used it for construction -- cutting 6x6 posts -- and firewood cutting. I cut down one dead jackpine and then bucked it up into 12-inch lengths -- about a week's supply of firewood in cool weather -- again on half a battery. 

The battery itself charges rapidly. When starting with a half charge it finishes topping up in the time it takes to eat lunch. I would recommend not purchasing extra batteries. You just don't need them and when bought alone, they are expensive.

It's a sweet saw and for $350, a bargain.

Loons, spruce seeds and fishing

 

Black spruce seed

Perhaps the best news of the summer is that the loons successfully nested on Red Lake. The resident pair near our cabin had two young. They were nearly full grown when we left. We saw loons with young in many other parts of the lake too.

I am stumped on what makes a good loon nesting year. Our pair had not fledged any young in five years and that seemed to be a common condition around the lake. Last spring we had very high water and very cold temperatures. I guess that's just what the loons wanted.

It was also a great year for the conifers to produce cones. Both the black spruce and balsam fir around our place were so top heavy with cones that the tree tops were nodding. When the spruce cones opened in early September their single-winged seeds rained down for weeks. 

Alas, the cold start to the fishing season screwed things up all summer. Walleye never seemed to come into the shallows to spawn and when the water did warm up in July the fish just stayed out in the deep.

I caught only three walleye off the dock all summer. Normally I would catch dozens. I probably only caught a half a dozen pike and just two bass. I did have a small lake trout follow my lure in June.

Brenda and I did manage to get a couple of pike to eat by taking to the boat about six times. On our last trip we were skunked.

The best fishing always comes from early warm springs. That's what the fish like and what we want too.

Warblers are feasting on fall sweets

The weather here in Northwestern Ontario has been incredibly hot for this time of year. We have had daytime temps of 28 C which is in the 80s F. That anomaly is probably why we are still seeing warblers. In fact our yard here in Nolalu is abuzz with the little guys shown above. 

If you are a birder you know how difficult it is to distinguish warbler species in the fall. My bird book has an appropriately-titled page called "Confusing Fall Warblers." I frankly quit trying years ago but the ones we are seeing all over the lawn are pretty easy. The clue is the birds' rear ends. Yellow-Rumped Warbler. 

The other dead give away comes from where these warblers are feeding -- the ground. To my knowledge, they are the only warbler in these parts anyway that catch their prey on the ground. It would be nice to think they are eating the cluster flies that are just everywhere at this time of year but as I was manning the barbecue the other day I could see that at least some of them were picking off the white-coloured fruit flies that are very difficult for humans to detect. It usually takes bright sunlight with a dark background to see these minute flies.

Up at camp we saw ring-billed gulls catching the same tiny flies in mid-September. 

The fruit flies are found wherever there are asters which are  late-summer flowers that grow almost everywhere. They must be super nutritious for big birds like gulls to bother catching them out of the air. I would imagine the Yellow-Rumped Warblers are using the flies to fatten up before they head to Central or South America for the winter.
 

So close to finishing but we came home

 

The front room just needs the kitchen stove and fridge moved into it and all the trim.

Scene off the deck the night before we left.

We are sleeping in the big cabin and can heat it with our wood stove which we did a couple of times. But we planned from the start this summer to button up the place and go home to Nolalu on Sept. 16 and that is what we did. We have things at home that need to be done in the fall and they have gone by the wayside the last five years while we were building the cabin on Red Lake.

It seems to me that we have been building this place for a decade but Brenda proved to me before we left that it has actually been just five years. We began by pulling a dock loaded with lumber all the way from town in 2019. From there we built a landing for the dock and a 12x24 cabin which we call the dockhouse and in which we have lived until this September.

Then we had the covid setback in 2020. I just finished the dockhouse that year. I started the main cabin in 2021 and got the foundation and subfloor completed. In 2022 I built the walls and roof and put on the steel siding. In 2023 I completed the interior walls and much of the interior paneling and plumbing. With help from my brother-in-law, Ron Wink, we installed the solar system and wired the joint.

This year I finished the paneling, installed the kitchen cabinets and put down the finished floor in about two thirds of the building. Only the two bedrooms still need the finished floor. 

Brenda and our neighbour Kim Austen have painted all but one bedroom. The flooring is just waiting to be put down. We have gone with 9-inch luxury vinyl planks.

I anticipate finishing the move from the other cabin, hooking up the main bathroom, including hot water, in two weeks when we go back next spring. And that is taking into account my formula for how long things take now that we are older. I take the estimated time and multiply it by pi.

Striving to move into new cabin

I have the deck built on the front of our new cabin now and next will make the stairs that allow us access to the front door. As soon as that is done we can begin to move from the dockhouse.

Is summer finally making an appearance?

 The forecast shows highs in the lower 20s C. If true, it will be the first of the season. We have been plagued with rain and cold. Daytime highs have been more like 14 C. A few nights ago the low was 2 C.

The lake now might be a foot higher than when we first came and the water is way colder than normal.

This must have impacted fishing success but I only have a couple of reports to go on. In Red Lake, walleye fishing heats up with the temperature in the spring. I've always been stumped why fishermen refuse to believe this but they don't. They believe with all their might that fishing starts out red hot and gets continually worse as the season progresses.  In reality, it starts slow and gains momentum until mid-July and then stays about even until the weather starts to cool off in late August.

It also has been abnormally windy which limits where and how you can fish. Why is it always cold and windy but hot and still?

Nature notes so far this spring

A couple of friends from camp spotted a cow moose in Gooseberry Bay, just a hundred meters north of our cabin, a couple of days ago. This is a known moose calving spot so I hope that is what she was doing.

A bald eagle attacked three common merganser ducks right in front of us yesterday. The hen is using a nesting box I placed on a tree about 15 years ago. The eagle singled out one of the drakes and was gaining on him when they went out of sight.

A ruffed grouse has been drumming every 10 minutes, night and day, since we've been here. Where does he get the strength?

I've seen a meter-long garter snake twice.

Blackflies have been a problem obly a couple of days. It's just too cold.

Long underwear weather so far

We had a couple of sunny days at the cabin since arriving last week but mostly it has been cold and wet. There were even snow flurries yesterday.

The lake has risen a couple of inches.

The good news is forest fires won't be a possibility for a couple of months.

Making a landing strip for white pine seeds

I scratched up some bare dirt alongside my trail

 We have six white pine on our 65 acres in Nolalu and I would like to have more of these majestic trees. 

Five of the trees have seeded-in naturally from one big tree growing on a ridge toward the western side of our land. Three of the young trees are growing in a line, about 50 yards apart, northeast of the mother tree. In other words, a southwest wind -- pretty much our prevailing wind -- carried the seeds in this direction. 

I'm trying an experiment this spring to bring forth more Pinus strobus or perhaps I should say P. strobi which would be the plural, I think.

Nearly all of the seeds dropped by trees like the white pine don't grow because they don't land in a suitable spot. Seeds that lay upon moss or leaves or grass might germinate with moisture but will dry up and die before their tiny roots reach soil. 

Seeds that land on bare dirt, on the other hand, start growing immediately. There is a term for creating areas of bare dirt in the forest industry. It is called scarification and foresters don't call it dirt but mineralized soil.

So this spring I went around some of the areas that I have created clearings by firewood cutting in the past and have pushed off the grass thatch with my tractor bucket to reveal mineralized soil. All these spots are to the east of the mother tree. Let's see if any white pine seedlings appear in the next couple of years. 

I haven't tried this in the past because whitetail deer would have eaten every pine seedling. Following the enormous snowfall here in the spring of 2023, I estimate the current population of deer to be just 5-10 per cent of what it used to be. So there's a chance pine can get a head start and grow high enough to be out of the deer's reach before the population rebounds.

Making affordable moves to electricity

Stihl MSA 60 battery chainsaw cost $350

We will only be taking one vehicle to Red Lake from this point and that will be our eight-year-old Dodge Grand Caravan, not our 16-year-old pickup truck. That means we will have our chainsaw inside where we are sitting. Our great old Husqavarna leaks and reeks chain oil and gasoline so we have purchased a new battery electric chainsaw for the cabin. It is the Stihl MSA 60. I was able to get this for $350 which includes the battery and charger.

It is a small saw with a 12-inch cutting bar but it should do the job for us at the cabin. Mostly we will use it for cutting up wind-blown trees but we will also probably cut about a third of a cord of firewood each year.

In other electric news at our house, our Rinnai on-demand propane hot water heater has stopped working after just six years and there seems no one in Thunder Bay interested or capable in fixing it. So, it has become the most expensive piece of artwork we have on the wall and we have gone back to our electric hot water tank which we still owned.

Finally, the electronic oven control in our propane kitchen range died. We will be replacing this in the future with an induction stove top and electric oven.

We are a ways off replacing our vehicle with an electric one. For one thing we are not going to pay double what a gas vehicle costs and will wait until mass production brings the costs down.

The only thing left after that will be how we heat our home. Currently we do it with a propane furnace and a wood-burning stove. The furnace is over 20 years old. When it dies, we will need to come up with an electric alternative.

Red Lake ice-out was May 7

 Warm temperatures and, more importantly, a high wind took out the ice on Red Lake and all the other water bodies except Trout Lake on May 7. 

Satellite photos showed Trout to still have some ice yesterday, May 8. Trout Lake is higher than other area lakes and that extra bit of elevation means the air temperature is cooler. It's also a bigger, round-shaped lake and deeper. All those things can make ice-out five days or so later than Red Lake.

Ice-out Red Lake -- it's happening

 

EOSDIS Worldview pic today, May 6. Ice mostly gone

Brian was able to fly from the river, over the ice and into open water in the narrows at camp on Saturday. He said there was lots of ice remaining in the lake but with the warm temperatures in the forecast it would seem total ice-out is just days away.

Once the ice has melted away from the shoreline, which it has, it starts shifting with the wind and crushing against the windward shore.

Hooray!

Wooden lure maker now has website

Nolalu wooden lure artist Dwayne Kotala has started a website where you can see and order his lures on-line. The site is still under construction but does display a few of his hand-carved wooden lures and gives you a way to contact him.

The URL of the site is fuddyduddystudio.square.site

You can find him by typing that into your search engine window or just by clicking here on lures.

 

Where the heck have I been?

EOSDIS Worldview

 Sorry folks, I was out of the country for nearly a month and was not able to update ice-out conditions on Red Lake. 

The latest that I have heard is that the ice is still shore-to-shore, is 16 inches thick but is candled and ripe for breakup.

I wish I had left my first prediction at May 8 as that is likely close to actual ice-out.

The last few weeks of April turned out colder than normal and that set back ice melting. Again, it is only the weather in April that matters. It was the warmest winter on record but it played no part on ice-out.

You can see daily detailed satellite photographs that show ice melt by going to this site EOSDIS Worldview. The satellite passes over Northwestern Ontario about 3 p.m. EST each day. All it takes to see what is happening with the ice is a clear sky. Unfortunately, the last day that happened was April 24, a week ago. In the screen shot of EOSDIS Worldview above, you can clearly see that Middle and Sadler Bays -- small water bodies at the west end of Red Lake -- are still frozen.

 Zoom Earth also has near real-time imagery but it is not as detailed.

You can also download the free apps for both of these satellites to your smart phone. That is what I have done.

Red Lake ice-out moves to May 1

 There's bluebird weather in the forecast the next two weeks and that makes me move my final ice-out prediction to May 1 or one week earlier than "normal."

We deserve a nice spring after some of the crappy ones in the last few years.

Finally, some snow to ease our drought

 

Today, April 1, 2024

We got about a foot of snow last week here in the Thunder Bay area. That was the first snowfall since early January. The ground was bare almost the entire winter. Red Lake did not get this dump but does have some snow, just less than this.

Missing the boat on electric outboards?

 I've been researching electric outboards this winter and, as usual, have found that most of my big ideas have already been put into practice by someone else.

My first idea was that while mono hull boats have little room for batteries and solar panels, pontoon boats have lots of space and weight-carrying ability. Pontoon craft are all the rage right now and I have been impressed at what they they can do.

Sure enough, a search for electric pontoon boats on YouTube brings up production models on the market in Florida. But the higher-performance ones seem to rely strictly on shore-power charging of batteries which can weigh 800 pounds. On a pontoon boat 800 pounds isn't much of a factor. 

Searches of solar-powered pontoon boats brings up boats with roofs covered from end to end with solar panels and then propelled with a low-powered electric motor. My little bit of experience with solar generation at the cabin makes me think both systems are missing the mark.

Nowhere is there as much sunlight as in a boat. That sunlight not only strikes from above but reflects off the water. So access to energy is not a problem. You just need to get it to the motor. The battery is slowing things down. You can only charge batteries so fast. That is why you have charge controllers on solar systems -- to keep from charging too fast and from overcharging. So why can't we have a system where the motor gets its energy right off the panels and bypasses the batteries? It could do both at the same time, of course.

And then there is the electric motor itself. I think it should be capable of at least two voltages, a higher voltage when the power is coming off the panels and then a lower voltage when running on the battery. Dual voltage electric motors exist right now, just not for boats.

The panels don't have to be on the roof either. They can be on the skirting below the rail. If the panels were the type that generate electricity from either side, a boat could get twice the electricity. 

Pontoon boats that charge their batteries from shore are just substituting batteries for fuel tanks. That's a waste when the boat is flooded with sun -- read that electricity -- while on the water.

I think solar boats should be able to go faster when there is lots of sun, just like a sailboat does with wind.

I'm telling you, the power coming off solar panels is incredible.

Ice-out on Red Lake will be May 8!

 How do I know this?

Well, April is just about here and using my system that says April's weather is the only month that matters when it comes to ice-out, I look at the Weather Network's 14-day forecast and see that the first two weeks of April are expected to have normal temperatures. Normal ice-out is May 8. So there you have it.

If the actual weather differs from the prediction or if the last two weeks of April are not normal, I will adjust my ice-out time.

I'm 'in the pink' with new wooden lures

 I'm looking forward to trying new wooden lures made by my neighbour, Dwayne Kotala. I'm lucky to get prototypes of what might become production models in the future.

Dwayne hand-carves these from native tree species like pine. Many are modeled on historic lures from 100 years ago. Some come right from Dwayne's imagination. 

I'm going to use these to fish for northern pike, my favourite species. I cast for these fish, mostly, and an advantage of wooden lures is they are heavier than plastic models; so, I can use my baitcasting rig which is ideal for handling big pike. The drag system on a baitcaster is so smooth compared to a spinning reel.

I surprised Dwayne, I think, years ago by telling him that pike like pink. As you can see he has painted many of these models just for me.

I replace the trebles on Dwayne's lures with single salmon or siwash hooks. The reason is the fish tend to take the entire bait into their mouths and the trebles are too difficult to extract quickly. 

I left the trebles on one of the lures in the photo to show how much larger a single hook needs to be to work effectively. 

Salmon lures almost always have single hooks. The reason, I'm told, is that when a fish is caught with a single hook it nearly always stays on.

If you are considering changing hooks as I have done you need to know that ordinary single hooks will not do the trick. You can't use a baitholder hook, for instance. It needs to be a salmon hook. These have long shanks, both on the standing part and the barb part. 

Siwash hooks are just salmon hooks with an open eye that you can close with pliers. You can only do this once. If you try to re-open it, it will likely break. 

Make sure your hooks on plugs face forward. That way you will pull them into the fish's mouth when you set the hook. 

****Update****

Dwayne now has a website where you can order his creations.