Week four Ennadai Lake Lodge

Week Four at the Lake

sunrise Friday

Saturday night sunset

The week passed in a blur with work taking up all of our attentions during the days. Temperatures finally warmed up and as a result we had some mosquitoes, followed by a day or two of blackflies. The bites are not as irritating as southern bug-bites and increasingly we put our bug-suits and bug hats aside. The forest fires have returned. Air quality definitely suffers, but on the plus side, the bugs pack-up and go away. Because of the forest fires the sunrises and sunsets have been spectacular

Sailor Sue is an absolute marvel. She is adding skills to an already impressive resume. As a budding videographer she has been filming every takeoff and landing here. She has named one of the dehaviland ’Buffalo’ supply aircraft –“Snoopy” because of its little black Radome nose and is making a film that shows the improvements to the runway as they are done.

 She has also been doing daily photos of our own work for the record.

Meanwhile her very latest skill is insulating and jacketing the hot water pipes of the solar hot water system that we are building.

While Max and I have moved to work indoors fabricating manifolds, installing the pipes up through the floor,  she is outside – polishing up the final details.

Mike flew out on Snoopy for a much needed four day R & R , after the shipment of photovoltaic solar panels and the new wind turbine were unloaded.

When Mike flies back on Wednesday he will be accompanied by the electrician and his wife who will installing the new equipment.

Meanwhile Norm, the plumber, is under the gun to complete his installation of the new boiler and all its fittings so he can go back to Yellowknife on the plane. 

Al has been busy with the construction of the battery house assisted by Peter and Seeme.

Six days of work and a much needed day of relaxation when we catch up with our correspondence, write our blog and edit our photos.
Today we took a road trip on the four wheelers, Sue's very first foray into the forest trails on her own quad. It is quite the experience and for those of you who know of her legendary tractor driving skills can understand her trepidation in driving a four wheeler

moonrise

Slow week at Ennadai lake Lodge

The two of us together

 Slow week at Ennadai

It has been a slow week here at the lake. While the rest of the country got warm, we had single digit temperatures, wind and showers.                                                   

   If we look cold in this picture, it is only because we really were cold.

  

The work moved forward, with Max and Sue teaming up to handle the pipefitting side of things.

 The bad weather abated just enough for a couple of pilots from Alaska to drop out of the sky on an overnight visit. Kodiak Air were just checking out the facilities in a whirlwind tour of the Canadian Arctic.

The work continues until late in the week but it was generally too rough to go out fishing in the evenings. One of our number is due to fly out next week and was getting a little desperate but on Thursday, the break in the weather gave Tam his chance.

He was the first of a flood of evening fishermen. By Sunday afternoon, Susan and I got our turn and opted for exploring the southern end of the lake. Susan did pull in (and release) a 2 pounder but after that we decided that we would rather just cruise around. We decided to look for the camp that we have seen canoe-ists coming from on a couple of occasions. A couple of hours later, their secret campsite still a mystery to us, we were looking at thunder clouds bearing down on the lodge, about two miles away.

 After an hour circling to the South-west we skirted the worst of them and made a dash for the lodge. The two foot chop gave the Lund a good test, and the boat passed with honours – a very dry ride even at bone-shaking speeds.

We had some serious social obligations and we were not going to be late!!

‘Sweetness’ has managed to get her paw slammed in a door and has been ‘playing-up’ the limp for everyone. It was Susan’s turn to give sweetness a good half-hour of cuddles. The pace here is really hectic !

 Susan has been looking at cruise deals online. I guess she is looking forward to a vacation.

Let us know how this format change works for you. Some have commented that the pictures will not display for them because of the way we had them imported so we are trying something different.

Since we have been here we have watched several planes land: a couple of Dash 7s from Air Tindi . a Dornier 228, a Buffalo from Summit Air and a couple of Quest Kodiak 100 from Alaska. Over the course of these past three weeks Mike has been upgrading and grooming the dirt runway to improve the landings and takeoffs. I have posted  videos that show the conditions pilots are landing in and the improvements that are being made just follow the links with the name.

This is the Dash 7 we arrived on. I love the colour of this plane. It will carry sixteen passangers plus crew and a large cargo.

 

Red Dash 7 July 7th
http://vimeo.com/71084677http://vimeo.com/71084677

Air Tindi Dash 7  
We rely on these beautiful planes to bring in all our supplies and materials. Below our crew are unloading the Air Tindi Dash 7 which is a little stuck. The pilot had taxied too far down the runway and when he tried to turn around got a little stuck. He was able to easily move the plane after a little digging.









Buffalo Dust storm 

Scott and Sweetness

The flight from Resolute the day after we arrived carried our carpenter, Al, and Scott's new puppy, Sweetness.

Quest Kodiac 100

Rich and Richard flew in from Resolute in their Quest Kodiacs pictured to the right in time for a late evening meal. They had just dropped off some tourists in Yellowknife after visiting the northern arctic for ten days. Apparently these two gentlemen flew supplies into the mars project on a regular basis.

Dornier

This German made Dornier arrived Monday, July 22nd and carried away with it three of our crew members;  Scott and Sweetness, Sam the mechanic, and Norm the plumber's partner, Noella.

Dinner time at Ennadai Lake

The work, play and sleep schedule here at Ennadai Lake revolve around the three main events of the day, meal times. We are very fortunate here to have a very fine chef who knows the way to our hearts.

Chef Caroline

Chef Caroline owns a newly renovated house to the North west of Montreal where she received her training.
For the last three or four years, she and her husband, Eric, have been working in the North, first at Baker Lake and then in Resolute in the hotel business.
Her last northern experience is here at Ennadai Lake before she returns to Montreal to continue her culinary career.

Mocha Chocolate Cheese Cake

Her stated field of expertise is as a pastry chef but the food savvy  crew that she caters to feels she covers all the bases exceptionally well.
As one of the crew exclaimed after a delicious entree of scallopine made with real cream,"I have never worked away from home where I  actually put on weight." That meal was rounded off with Mocha Chocolate Cheesecake pictures to the right.

Bean and Corn salad

 Most meals are accompanied by two salad choices. Pictured below is a bean and corn medley spiced with cumin and lemon juice and tossed with olive oil, as well as diced onion, celery, tomato and pepper.

Scallopini

Because we are in a remote northern area, Caroline has to pre-order food and ingredients. Although planes have made weekly visits here, the food order comes in once a month. Some careful planning is required in order to have a well stocked kitchen here. No one can be sent to the corner store (400km away) for a missing ingredient.

We have been here long enough with the same crew that we interact like a family. Most of the other team players have known one another for a few years and with familiarity comes.... playful moments. Caroline's husband, Eric, likes to organize us to be more accommodating to his routine, KP duties. We have several reminders posted around the lodge to return our dishes and glasses to the kitchen and which side of the sink to put them. the picture to the left is a reaction of Mike, a long time crew member.

Week Two Ennadai Lake

Boat Boy and Sailor Sue Do Nunavut - Week Two

On Tuesday evening I was driving around the site on my favorite ‘quad’ and visited the caretaker’s cabin, located well away from the main resort. After getting off to check out the Solar Photo Voltaic system in use I was about to get back on the ATV when I was approached by a lovely fox. She had shed most of her silver winter coat, leaving her with her black summer coat showing through. Just beautiful! She paced me as I drove back to the resort, and went to the back door to await a ‘treat’.  Feeding the animals is bad policy. Building dependencies on the part of the wildlife sets them up for a letdown when the humans go away. And of course, if the wildlife includes the bears, then the last thing you want to do is to attract them. (picture of Vixen courtesy of Scott)

So what was I to do? I gave her a piece of leftover chicken from the fridge, of course.

She was later seen moving her six kits to a new den, further from the resort. I think that Scott's new puppy was ranging far enough from the lodge to be a threat to them.

Meanwhile, the younger members of our crew were out checking out the fauna in the ‘mule’, our all terrain diesel truck. Some of the tales of their adventures are starting to come out at the dinner table. Terns attacked Peter and Seemee when they were fishing along the lakeshore a few evenings ago. Seemee got video of an angry tern flying down, hovering and pecking Peter’s head. The boys must have been practically on top of a nest to cause that reaction.

On Wednesday we were sitting down to lunch as a Helicopter circled the lodge and landed, bringing three visitors to join us at the table. The visitors were our “landlords”, dropping by to inspect the operation on behalf of the government of Nunavut. To Mike, our heavy equipment operator, fell the task of escorting the guests and addressing their concerns. After a few hours they flew away, leaving flattering comments in their wake about the orderliness of the site.

Thursday dawned a windy, rainy day, the first in the 11 days since we arrived here in Nunavut. Different facets of the project are coming together and for our part, the two-story array framework is complete and with the lower tier of collector manifolds installed. Max and I had a quick practice session on the threader yesterday and are ready to start installing some of the two inch steel pipe that forms the main artery joining the mechanical room and the solar array, as well as the ¾” steel pipe that connects each node to that 2” pipe at that artery. It’s too bad the couplings weren't shipped with the rest of the parts last week because we could be installing pipe by now .

It’s Friday and it is another great, wet day in paradise! The weather station says wind speed is only 23 knots, but the rain is a solid horizontal sheet and Susan noticed that the windsock and its mast have blown over. Yesterday morning we did not work due to a light rain and strong winds. Today the rains are worse and it is just as windy.

On the bright side of things we are no longer surrounded by forest fires.

We had an afternoon of showers and were able to work between them. All of the collectors are now mounted and the catwalk to service the top row of collectors will likely be finished before the plane comes tomorrow…

No dice! Nine degrees, rain and wind. With the ceiling under 300 feet for a while, the plane was cancelled for today. We are all waiting for materials, and plugging around the place. Mike has the dirt runway looking like pavement and we are hoping that the pilots fro Air Tindi will be impressed and tell all their buddies how great it is. The skies broke blue with some patches of cloud at suppertime so Sue and I decided we’d go for a putt and a troll. It was pretty exciting.

First we cleaned the water from the gas tank (again). Am I the only one who closes the vent?  And then we were off, exploring the lake and its inlets on the western side of the lodge. We were idling out of one of those inlets after a few casts into the weeds, when Sue let out an excited yelp and the drag started slipping on her reel. “WOW”…says I to myself…”this must be where the big Pike hang out. “

When I put the boat into neutral we seemed to be going backwards…Holy Smokes!

We soon realized that we had a snag – but - well, the excitement got better than this! A few coves later we were entering a weedy patch when a big fish jumped right beside the boat. Within a few boat lengths my rod was giving me some vibes. A hit, then another …but not a solid strike. The rod stayed loaded so I reeled as Sue put the dipnet over the side. It was a good thing she did or we might not have been able to retrieve all those weeds!!!

Only a few casts and it started to rain. We, being made of sugar, we decided that we had better run for it. Flat out, the Mercury 25 had our Lund 16 skimming toward the rainbow and I thought to myself: ”Virgil Flowers, eat your heart out.”

week 1 Nunavit

The Summer Travels of Boatboy & Sailor Sue

Or:   Where is the boat?

Departing  SJ, we broke our standard rule of only taking Carry-On luggage. By some miracle, we went through two stop-overs and arrived with the checked bags in Yellowknife on the same aircraft as ourselves. We linked-up with Max (our apprentice –nephew from Sackville), at our hotel when his flight arrived late in the evening and had our last can of beer together before a 2 month dry spell.

Change of plan. We spoke to Azi, the owner, who advised that we would be on-site before our materials. And that we were joining with three others, all flying in from Resolute, to perform the work. GREAT!  I was wondering how we would handle what looked like a growing scope-of-work for this project. Six of us should be able to make things rock.

And, one other thing....the flight tomorrow had been moved to a different charter airline and an earlier departure. Hmmmm.... “How much earlier?” was my question. There were people up and around early in Yellowknife, but as near as I could tell, people were not being fed breakfast in Yellowknife on  Saturdays, unless they could cook it for themselves.

As it turned out, we were able to get a toasted bagel and a coffee. With something in our stomachs we hurried from the restaurant directly to the shuttle. Only a few minutes later we were lifting into a clear blue sky for the 2 hour flight: destination - Ennadai Lake.

We had the cargo on our Dash-7 unloaded and the aircraft turned-around for its return flight to Yellowknife just before the Dehaviland Buffalo arrived at Ennadai Lake from Resolute with more of our supplies. Empty, the Buffalo flew away only to return a few hours later with 40 barrels of fuel and 17- 100 pound tanks of propane. We finally sent the Buffalo crew home to their wives in Yellowknife at 10:00 p.m. It had been a busy day. Even after the sun went down at midnight, we stayed awake, our body-clocks not yet adjusted to the 20 hours of sunshine per day.

The sun was up at 4:00 am on Sunday morning and we arose ready to start work on our project. We all showed up at the breakfast table and our cook, Caroline – gave us a full breakfast.

Sunday: We began opening boxes for the 22 solar collectors and assembled a few. When Max had the assembly under control, Susan and I split-off to lay out the array and to mark the locations for the 24 poles that we had to plant to support the array. We worked along, but spent a lot of our time hunting for tools and materials as these items were randomly packed for shipment.

Monday: Mike brought the excavator and its post hole auger over and drilled the holes. Max and SeeMee had the poles in the ground and back-filled by the end of the day. After supper we took the 18 foot skiff out for a spin and discovered that there was a lot of water in the fuel. We MacGuyvered our way back to the dock and decided to plan our next outing a little better.

Pic 2 – the boys in the skiff

Tuesday:  Work, work, work!  We designed the frames for the upper row of panels in the array to accommodate the ``shortish`` poles we are working with. Max spent the day doing metal fabrication in the workshop after we came up with a new bracket design.  This is the life -  the challenge of design, and talented hands to implement the design.

Wednesday: The daytime temperatures have finally come down from the daytime normal of 32 degrees. We have been working in our `bug jackets`and `bug hats` from necessity, but by late afternoon we had something else to contend with: smoke from the numerous forest fires in northern Manitoba a few hundred miles to our south. Susan and I sealed our suite and turned the ceiling fan to full speed. At midnight we took the `Mule` out for a drive south to the high ridge a mile from the end of our runway. The forest was ethereal in the smoke, with sand forming much of the forest floor. And we had left our camera back at the resort. Note to selves:  carry the camera!

Pic 3  - the drill job

Thursday: The wind reversed overnight and temperatures are down into the low teens. No bugs, no smoke Seemee and Mike, both from Resolute, agree that we are now getting down into the comfort zone.  Apparently the insects disagree, as the cool temperatures and steady 15 knot breeze have kept them away. Work, work, work. The end is in sight for collector assembly. We had to pull some poles that were just too short and replace them with longer ones. This led to a repair job on the new drill which tied-up 4 people for a while. The operation was a success.

Friday: With a rapid final effort we finished all of the solar collectors, and have a small list of missing parts to deal with.  Our supplier sent us the kiss-off on the spares. I guess we will be making the parts. Ah well, they won`t be needed for a few weeks yet.

Pic 4 – the array

Saturday: Site cleanup day in anticipation of another planeload of materials. The Dash 7 returned at 1:30 pm – bringing more materials and two additional members for our construction team. Norm and Luella joined from Yellowknife to complete plumbing work and to install a new boiler.  Our 22 solar collectors are assembled and the frame to support them is largely complete. Sunday (tomorrow) we intend to take a day off, or at least part of the day...Peter, Seemee and Max spent some of the evening out on the lake fishing. Al did likewise with the other skiff. At about 9:30 pm Sue and I decided we’d go for an evening troll. We travelled several miles –with only one hit. As we turned to return to the lodge, I suggested to Sue that she let out more line. Within a few minutes she had a good sized lake trout aboard. It weighed 4 pounds and was 24 inches long.

Pic 5 the trout

Breakfast was now assured, we returned to land well in time for sunset, which was at about 11:00 pm as of last night. The days are noticeably shorter: only 18 hours of daylight now!