What a Long Strange Trip its been!

In the 26 years we’ve owned the camp I’ve never seen a spring like this one! Two weeks of dry weather in the upper 80’s F to lower 90’s and little rain. The lake temp today is 76F and the lake level is at normal summer pool. We have gotten some rain in the last few days but I am sure we’re still behind normal levels. Everything is operating as though its late June. The dragonflies have hatched, blackflies appear to be in early retreat, the bass are nesting early and the weeds are already to the surface several places on the lake. Speaking of first – I went swimming in Firth for the first time in May! It was delightful – a little cold at the bottom but just fine – No Shit! Another first that I’ve noticed is the number of bass nests near our beach. We even have a nice nest about 10 feet out from shore between the docks! I got pictures of them breeding a couple days ago.

They built a really beautiful symmetrical nest that looks just fabulous with all the multicolored granite pebbles. They must feel safe there since there is little boat traffic yet and besides all the pebbles are of the right size. The fishing has been similar to late June early July too! The pike and bass are in the fully formed weed beds. The bass must be really torn between setting up nests and breeding versus hanging out in the weeds and dining on the shoals of minnows.

We went fishing down the Montreal and caught a shit load of small pike and many nice sized walleyes too. As exciting as the fishing was (and it was exciting) it didn’t hold a candle to the hair raising trip back from Penassi! A huge thunder storm kicked up and hit us with high winds and drenched us with torrential rain. This was actually quite refreshing as the day was so fucking hot. But then the lightening started. Wow! We were involved with a few nearby strikes and were headed for shore when Pat said “Gee the only way this could be worse is HAIL.” What a fucking bastard!!!! (At least he didn’t say “It could only be worse if a cyclone came up killing us all”!) It immediately began to beat the shit out of us with walnut sized hailstones! I shit you not! It was like being caught in a frozen meteor shower creating small geysers whenever they hit the lake surface! We had to put our seat cushions over our heads to avoid injury! But our exposed fingers on the top of the cushion took a beating. We also hit a submerged log with the motor on the way back! Jeesh! But we all got back in one piece and had great fishing and an eventful day worthy of many stories for the retelling.

Much is happening here at camp. I am fixing boats and motors, upgrading the showers (Hailstorm-Pat jacked up the southwest corner), putting a new washroom on cabin #9, making stop gap repairs to roofs, completing the underground wiring on the beach front as well as constructing a new building for the used generator we just purchased in Haileybury. The person handling the parts to reconstruct the Lister is no longer working for Maine Diesel and he never ordered the parts sooooooo – the Lister reconstruct will be delayed. Sooooo when we saw the used heavy-duty generator for a good price, we decided to over-stress our  camp budget to bring it on board. I picked up a full sized 10′+ diameter fiberglass TV dish at the dump last year and have decided to use it as the generator building roof. Get this, we’ll have the only camp in the north with a trebuchet AND a generator rotunda dome! I hope the Milner county architectural purity committee doesn’t catch wind of it! Of course this is all in addition to all the normal things we have to do here at camp – fishing, happy hours, painting, cleaning, changing the oil on all the equipment, dock setup, dump runs, fixing boats and motors, cabin repairs and so on. Its really a lot of fun – is this heaven? No its Sportsmen’s Camp