It's time to fish or cut bait

 Metaphorically speaking, that is. I mean, don't go fishing yet because the season doesn't open until May 20. Nothing stopping you from cutting bait at this time though.

What I'm saying is, it's time to gaze into the crystal ball, throw a dart at the board, play a hunch, take a risk, stick your neck out and pick a date for ice-out in Red Lake.

So, here's my prediction: May 13. 

We got a clear image from space today on Worldview as you can see above. It shows no snow on the ground from Duluth all the way north to Northern Manitoba. You can find Red Lake by finding the larger zig-zag lake about three-quarters up. That's Lac Seul. Its northwest end points to Pakwash Lake. To its northwest is Gullrock Lake and to its northwest is Red Lake, the horizontal lake with the hammerhead on the west end partly obscured by cloud. Trout Lake is the large roundish lake to the east of Red Lake.

Incidentally, Nolalu is well off this image to the northeast. We still have a foot of snow in the bush here and several inches out in the open. Most of this came in two dumps during the past two weeks.

If you want to load the above image into your computer so that you can enlarge it for better resolution, click here.

Getting ready for solar system at cabin

We have ordered our solar system for the cabin at Red Lake. The plan is to install it in late-June after we have our cabin fully wired.

Maier Hardware in Thunder Bay will be our equipment provider. This is the same company that supplied us with all our electrical needs when we built our home in Nolalu, 40 years ago. Maier is a long-time supplier of solar equipment in the region and has extensive knowledge and experience about what is needed for a remote installation like ours.

There may be cheaper suppliers; however, my experience is that I have never minded paying for quality and always regret buying junk. 

We began by listing all of our electrical requirements to Maier's Dave Green. They were minimal. A cell-phone booster, the occasional use of a kitchen mixer, places for people to plug-in their computers and phones, CPAP machines for our friends and relatives. The biggest electrical consumer will be a washing machine but that won't be used every day and since we will dry our clothes on the clothesline, means we will be washing only on sunny days when solar power is plentiful.

At 3,000 watts our solar system is about as small as you can get without just buying some solar panels and charge controllers from Canadian Tire.

We already have a solar fridge and water pump. They are stand-alone units and won't be part of the bigger system. However, eventually the fridge will need replacing and when that time comes the new system is already designed to handle a standard Energy Star-rated home unit.

I can see it will take us awhile to get our heads around how to best use the solar system. Dave had asked if we were going to have a microwave or coffee maker. Of course not, we said, those things use too much electricity. Well, we still can have such conveniences, he pointed out. You just need to use them differently. For instance, rather than heating up leftover pizza in the propane stove oven -- something that might take 30 minutes and produce unwanted cabin heat in the summer -- we can pop it in the microwave for just a minute. A coffeemaker takes eight minutes to brew a pot. At that point we can pour the coffee into an insulated carafe and turn off the electricity-draining warming plate.

Thanks to LED technology, cabin lights are not even an issue. They take practically no juice.

We already have a water-treatment system that we have been using the last couple of years in the dockhouse. This uses filters and a UV light. We will move this to the big cabin. We filter just our drinking water which is kept in the five-gallon blue jugs. It takes about 10 minutes to fill two or three of these. For Brenda and me, that's enough for more than a week.

One of the things we have figured into the equation are electric fans for every person, especially for sleeping. These too don't use much power.

Our system is designed to produce the electricity we need most of the time but not in all circumstances. That would take a far more costly installation. In the fall when daylight is short or for extended cloudy periods, we will likely need to start the generator at times. This will both provide immediate power to the cabin but also will charge the solar system batteries in about four hours. The system will then be good for another few days without need of the generator. If sunny weather returns, we may not need the generator at all, even in the fall.

We can always use the generator for large power needs such as extended periods of using the air compressor and multiple power tools. Those things will run on the cabin system too, just not all day. The cabin system will easily recharge tool batteries and we have also purchased a cordless lawn mower.

The point is to drastically reduce our use of propane and gasoline -- fossil fuels -- and to preserve the peace and quiet of being in a wilderness area.

Watch Gussie catch walleye on plastics

Want to take a lot of the aggravation out of fishing for walleye this summer? You know what I'm talking about: dead minnows, worms and leeches, deep-hooked fish that die, etc. Walleye fishing would be so much more pleasant if you took live bait out of the equation.  

Here's how to do it. Watch BassMaster Classic winner Gussie (Jeff Gustafson of Kenora) catch walleye and bass on Lake of the Woods last summer.

And here's something that should ease Red Lake anglers worries about smallmouth bass becoming established in Red Lake: Gussie catches both fish in the same place.

Big forest fires could change ice-out times

 As I looked at the area with no snow on the Windy app and then the area that burned in forest fires in 2021 as seen on the Worldview app, I realized they are one and the same. Then came the epiphany: the reason there is no snow on the ground from Red Lake west to Lake Winnipeg is the same reason there is no snow in central Manitoba -- there are no longer trees to create shade that slows down the spring melt.

It takes a little practice to interpret the Worldview satellite photo but that smooth, dun-coloured area west of Red Lake is all a burn. Many of the places that burned in 2021 had also burned in 2018 and 2016 and earlier.

In reading 2022 blogs of canoeists who paddled Woodland Caribou Provincial Park -- the area west of Red Lake -- they tell how places with 3-5-foot new growth trees from those earlier fires burned again in 2021. Even the standing dead tree trunks from those earlier fires burned. There wasn't even enough wood to make a campfire. In lots of places even the soil burned leaving nothing but exposed bedrock.

As I speculated in this blog at the fall of 2021, I wonder if the treeless prairie is now extending all the way to Red Lake?

Woodland Caribou is the eastern half of the gigantic wilderness canoeing area west of Red Lake. The Manitoba western side is called Atikaki Provincial Park. Together they encompass millions of acres and just about all of it has burned, mostly in 2021.

Forests have an impact on weather systems. They slow the wind and retain moisture. Now that there is mostly wide open space between Red Lake and the Prairies, I think we can expect some big changes.

Trout Lake angler George Miller uses the end of snow on the ground as a start to the countdown of when ice-out will occur on Trout Lake. It happens roughly 30 days later.

This makes sense. Once the snow is gone the dark ground heats rapidly and makes the whole area warmer. So early no-snow dates caused by lack of trees should lead to earlier ice-outs.

Oh baby! Summer-like temps ruining ice

 Check out this photo of Howey Bay in Red Lake, yesterday, taken by Red Lake Marine's Sherry McCoy.

All the snow has melted off the lake ice.

Then check out the snow cover layer on Windy.com website and app. It shows Red Lake and areas all the way west to Lake Winnipeg being barren of snow.

I'm moving my ice-out date back to May 8.

And if you are wondering where the snow-line is in North America, look at this clear view from NASA Worldview today.

April 1-7 was awful, ice-out now May 15

The first week of April could easily have been the first week of March, weather-wise. There was zero melting and a big dump of snow. So, I have adjusted my ice-out slide rule accordingly. At this point, I would say it will be a week late or May 15.

Big fishing news: record trout, Smeltinator

 Just in case you haven't been plugged in, a lady from Red Lake caught a record lake trout through the ice this winter, apparently at Trout Lake. 

At 58 inches and 57 pounds, it was certainly an ice fishing record in Ontario.

Here's a link to the CBC news story.

And in other big news, a professional angler from Kenora won the Bassmaster Classic, the first Canadian to ever do so. Here's a link.

Red Lake anglers should take note that Jeff Gustafson, aka Gussie, won the tourney using his own Smeltinator jig. 

All fish, including walleye, in Red Lake key-in on smelt. There's a tip for ya!

How did Skookum Bay get its name?

 In the old days when my dad, Don Baughman, and step-mom, Anne, operated Bow Narrows Camps they would travel to Red Lake from Mentor, Ohio, the first week of May and settle into the Red Lake Inn while they waited for breakup. 

With nothing much to do, they would drive around and look at the lake ice from various locations. It was during these little sightseeing trips that dad made a discovery. Every year the ice went out in Howey Bay seven days after it disappeared from Skookum Bay. 

Skookum Bay is a long, narrow, creek-like bay that you cross on a small bridge on Forestry Road. 

When I came back to the business in 1992 I would get telephone reports from Dad as he watched the bay. Our home in Nolalu, near Thunder Bay, is just a six-hour drive from Red Lake so there was no point in me waiting at the Inn with Dad and Anne. 

Finally, Dad would say the ice was gone in Skookum and so I should arrive in Red Lake seven days later. I would do so and would find Dad and Bob Uhrina from Red Lake Marine launching the Banana Split -- the camp's large trip boat. The ice was breaking and either we could go directly to camp that day or wait until the next to give the big ice pans a chance to blow against one shore  and leave a clear passage on the other.

After Dad passed, I would try to get reports from Red Lake residents on how Skookum Bay was melting. I even phoned people who worked at the Forestry Point and had to cross the bridge every day. None ever paid any attention to the bay and its ice. That's how I came up with my alternative method of calculating ice-out which I have documented here on the blog.

I've always wondered about how Skookum Bay got its name. I have read enough Jack London novels and Robert Service poems to recognize that Skookum is a west coast name or at least a far northwest name. There were lots of Skookum references in the Klondike gold rush. That rush took place in 1896 and was the second largest in history. The biggest was the San Francisco gold rush of 1849. The Red Lake rush in 1926 was the third-largest.

Could someone from the Klondike gold rush with a name like Skookum Joe have lived on the bay in Red Lake? It's possible.

But what does Skookum mean anyway? I found an interesting website called Indigenous Corporate Training Inc. that tells how First Nations had a special trading language called Chinook Jargon which let them do business with each other, especially the west coast nations. Non-indigenous people came to use this language as well and some of those terms are still used by us. Anyway, one of those Chinook jargon words is Skookum meaning big or powerful.

Skookum Bay is neither which makes me wonder if someone like "Skookum Joe" might have lived there. Anybody know?