Rainbow Smelt and Aurora Borealis

 The frailties of the human mind are revealed in these two stories.

When we came to Thunder Bay in 1979 I was eager to try smelting in the spring. With the first warm nights, everyone, it seemed, would stay up late at night along the shores of all the rivers and creeks and dip out the small silvery fish that had come ashore from Lake Superior to spawn. They were so abundant that in our first smelting trip, Brenda, our four-year-old son, Matt, and I discovered that one swoop of the net got more smelt than we had use for.

They made a good fish fry when fresh but weren't our favourite after they had been frozen. In the couple of years that followed we just kept those fish that Matt could catch with his bare hands. He would stand in the creek in his little rubber boots with me steadying him while the fish flashed by him by the millions.

By the time Matt was 6, however, we just couldn't repeat the performance. The smelt only run for about a week, so we thought we had just picked a bad night. However, when he was seven and eight, our bad luck continued.

I was an outdoor writer for the newspaper at the time and so asked the fisheries biologists if they could shed light on the subject. Actually, they said, there were no smelt runs occurring in the Thunder Bay area at all.

The runs take place in a pattern that circles the big lake about every 10 years. So, there might be a small run one year in Thunder Bay, followed by a tremendous run and in the third year, a small run. Then nothing for about a decade while the fish made their way around the world's largest lakeshore. Even though I reported all of this in the newspaper, most people seemed to not have gotten the news. They went smelting every year.

"Hey, Dan! Are you going smelting this weekend?" they would say, during those years when the run was happening on the other side of the lake, in Michigan.

Uh, no, I would reply. Are you?

"Absolutely! We go every year. We just love it!"

How did you do last year? I would ask.

"Last year? Hmm, I think we missed the run."

And the year before that?

"We seemed to have missed it that time too," they would say.

But the fact that they didn't catch anything, anything at all, hardly seemed to matter.

The banks of the creeks were lined by laughing, drinking revellers, dipping the empty water by the thousands, night after night, year after year. What great fun! Getting wet in the icy water, then drying off by a bonfire with a beer in hand.

It just never occurred to any of these people that there actually weren't ANY smelt out there. To them it just seemed chance when they "hit the run." They never noticed that event was 9, 10 and 11 years apart.

Now, what about the Aurora Borealis or the Northern Lights?

I grew up with the Northern Lights overhead at night. Not every night but frequently. Sometimes they were spectacular; sometimes they were faint. But they were fairly dependable at making an appearance.

Not any more. I saw a faint display a few nights ago and that was the first time I have seen them in about three years. People just refuse to believe this is so.

"Oh, you are just getting old. You go to bed early before the Northern Lights appear," they say. Or, "when was the last time you had your eyes checked? Maybe your eyesight is failing."

I do go to bed early but I also get up early, frequently before sunrise. There are no northern lights out there. Not here in Northwestern Ontario anyway.

If you want to see what northern lights look light, watch the flames flickering in the wood-burning stove while the Steel Drivers sing a bluegrass song. That is about as close to the real thing as you are going to get.

How can this be? The Aurora Borealis are gases at the outer edges of our atmosphere that are energized by radiation from the sun and fluoresce. That particular ionizing radiation is released when there are lots of sunspots which are storms on the sun's surface. Guess what? There are no sunspots occurring!

This isn't unheard of. In fact the sun goes through regular 10-year cycles of high activity and lulls. Incidentally, besides intense Northern Lights, the highs are marked by hot weather extremes here on Earth. These often mean bad forest fire years in Northwestern Ontario.

We are currently in a lull but it is not the usual 10-year doldrum. It's a multi-decade lull of near-historic proportions. The last time the sun was quite so quiet was during the last mini-ice age. In other words, the climate that we are currently experiencing -- the climate that is getting dramatically warmer -- is actually taking place during an exceptionally cold time for the planet.

Wait until the solar activity returns. "We ain't seen nuthin' yet."

 

 

'I Saw the Light'

 

What a tremendous amount of sunlight the days are bringing now

It is the coldest morning of the winter, -32 C plus enough wind to make the weather service sound the alarm about -40 C windchill.

The winter, the cold, the pandemic and just the uncertainty of things make us feel like we are bearing an enormous weight. For me, those symptoms of depression mean it is time to do something. For starters, let's just look where I am right now -- sitting in our sunroom at 9 a.m. and the sunlight is flooding me with its warmth. The days are much longer now and even though it is cold outside, the sunlight feels great.

Sunlight is such a wonderful thing. I heard someone from England on TV refer to places around people's homes that are sheltered from the wind and that face the sun as "sun traps." I like that. Even here, with the -40 C temperature, if I put my hand against a dark object that is facing the sun, the object is warm. I like to find our "sun traps" and stay there as long as I can with my face beaming back at the mother sun.

Lots of our friends and family in the States now report getting their covid vaccines. Way to go! That is tremendous news. It is slower for us here in Canada because we don't have any vaccine makers in the country; however, some vaccinations have already taken place. A real surge in vaccinations is expected to begin within a week or so. Everybody is supposed to get theirs by September. My guess is it will actually happen several months sooner. That should mean the border will open again. Hurray! 

Probably preventative measures like mask wearing will continue for awhile but so what? I've got no problem with it. The quicker we pound the virus into submission the better. Let's hit it with everything we've got.

I look at mask wearing-rules the same as those for public nudity. It just helps things run smoothly.

Incidentally, here in Canada we are not as uptight about nudity as people are in the States. I think the reason for that is our climate and bugs. Anyone who goes nude here deserves some admiration just for their toughness although their intelligence is, of course, suspect.

Anyway, cheer up everybody! Spring is just around the corner!

What a simple cabin water system

 

Tiny Shurflo pump produces four gallons per minute

When we were planning our cabin for Red Lake a few years ago I talked with a merchant in Red Lake who sells solar products. I was planning on mounting a big water tank on the hill behind the cabin that would feed by gravity. I wondered if there was a solar pump that would fill that tank. If not, I would use my Honda fire pump.

"Please, don't do that," said the man. "Try this system instead."

So last year, even though we only have the smaller "dockhouse" finished, we bought his system. It consists of the little pump shown above, a 12-volt battery, a small solar panel and a small charge controller. The whole thing, except for the solar panel, will fit inside of a plastic tote. The solar panel can be mounted to the top.

We hurriedly installed it, just to save carrying water pails from the lake to the dockhouse. We just have a single water tap inside. 

It worked like a charm although we were never able to connect the solar system. We were missing electrical connectors and the wire we had was too heavy to wrap around the little screws on the charge controller. So we just attached the pump to the battery. It has an automatic pressure switch built in. The pump comes on when we run the tap and supplies four gallons of water a minute. That's enough even for a shower. When we get the bigger cabin finished it may be necessary to add a pressure tank to keep up with demand but right now, that's all the water we need. 

I charged the battery with our generator only twice during the time we used the pump. It ran about two weeks between charging. The battery charger showed the battery really hadn't discharged very much in that time.

I was stumped when I went to attach the intake and discharge lines. None of my half-inch fittings would work. Finally Brian from the camp looked at it and realized it actually was made for Pex pipe. He gave me some clamps and his Pex tool and we were in business.