Elk Island's moods...

In June Samantha Page meets lake and sky as one

The summer paddling here in Winnipeg often starts with a day trip to Elk Island, about an hour's drive north of the city the small provincial park is still an accessible but quiet paddle. There are no developed "put-ins" or docks so power boat traffic is limited to a few fishers and cottagers at nearby Victoria Beach.

The Island park is restricted to day trippers, many wade across a sand bar to enjoy private pocket beaches on the south shore or hike trails that circumscribe the four and a half kilometer long island. Most visitors stay toward the south end. My favorite stop is a small deserted cove on the north west tip, where I seldom encounter more than soaring eagles, vultures and the occasional like minded paddler seeking solace on a quiet beach.

It is however a Lake Winnipeg Island. Our first visits this year stretched across mirror smooth waters and cloudless prarie blue skies. My last trip here in late September was clear and windy. Meter high swells made for interesting paddling, sand blasted us while we beach combed and ate a gritty lunch. Though later in the season, warm waters were still thankfully, comfortable.

Meter high September swells make interesting paddling

The Case of the Contract Killer

More Kayaking tales are to follow soon, here's a little interesting reading gleaned from another blogger (and Kayaker) I follow.

The Case of the Contract Killer

Violetta di Chioggia, Rosa Bianca Solanam melongena, Tom Thumb Latuca Sativa.

Recognize any of these names? Seen any of their faces around recently? No? This may come as a shock, but these are just a few of thousands who’ve gone missing. In fact, they’re on a hit list.

Oh, and did I mention they’re vegetables. Does that make a difference? It shouldn’t.

You see, we humans are accomplices in what could very well be our own demise. We’ve (if not knowingly) allowed a few corporations to whittle down our variety of food crops from thousands to a handful. I can see the mugshot of that herbicide-burping superbug now, chomping down and wiping another crop from our increasing paltry list. No, really, come back to the table and listen – you eat? Then this affects you.

We humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species over time. Now, three-quarters of all our produce comes from just eight species and, as biologist, author and locavore Barbara Kingsolver tells it, the field is “quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy, and canola.” Our food crops, Kingsolver says, could well make an endangered species list. We are, quite simply, undermining the security of our very own food system.

With genetically modified foods, we’re further undermining the security of that system with crop species being held against their will by a handful of powerful corporations intent on fooling around with their genes. Splicing together traits that aren’t even nodding acquaintances in nature can produce a vigorous plant for one generation, but the next generation is likely unpredictable and has no staying power.

But let’s back up and see how and why these disappearances started. Well, it has to do with the craving for tomatoes (or raspberries) at a time when even songbirds are sucking on dried up dogberries. And it also has to do with advances in long distance trucking. You see, up until the middle of last century, most North Americans were still eating fruits and vegetables that came from nearby farms, which also meant eating in season. Then marketers realized a market for out-of-season produce, like those tomatoes (or raspberries) titillating the taste buds of a society that was getting used to instant gratification. And then those tomatoes (or raspberries) needed larger and refrigerated trucks, and a super highway system to get these aliens to market.

Enter agribusiness into the contract. New breeds of produce were bred so that those tomatoes (or look at any produce at your local grocery retailer) could stand up to mechanized picking, packing, shipping and displaying on supermarket shelves. This uber tomato proved it could go the distance, but a few things got lost in the meantime: like flavour, often pest resistance and, no surprise, genetic diversity. There can, after all, only be one uber tomato, so uniformity and blandness became the trade-off signatures. Long distance travel, says Kingsolver, lies at the heart of the plot to murder flavourful fruits and veggies. Then the agribusiness breeding of indestructible produce ensured a market for tennis ball-like tomatoes. Farmers had little choice but grow what people (thought they) wanted, and seed catalogue offerings dropped more and more old-time trusted varieties. Today, not only plant varieties but whole species have been lost while six companies—Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Mitsui, Aventis, and Dow—now control 98 percent of the world’s seed sales.

There’s a few organizations that are on the look out for Violetta and friends. Slow Food International promotes agricultural biodiversity and has a twist on the save-the-endangered species line. Eat it. To save those rare species, the seed must be grown, plant harvested and eaten. Ditto that heirloom pig.

Closer to home, groups such as FEASt (Food Education Action – St. John’s), Farmers’ Markets and community gardens are springing up across the province, putting local food back on the menu and in the minds of residents.

Bottom line? Come clean. Don’t continue to be an accomplice to contract killing. Eat local. Reject uniformity. Check out grandma’s garden. Dissent. And have a flavourful day.
© Alison Dyer 2009

Island in a Prarie Ocean

"The wonder of Kayak travel is that it allows you to see all those islands, headlands, and promontories at a walking pace. That's about three miles per hour if there's no wind or current......if human senses---seeing hearing smelling and so on---evolved to work at their utmost saturation when a person is moving at the speed of natural locomotion, then Kayaking offers the traveler on of the most holistic and sensual rides."
Jennifer Hahn-Spirited Waters.

Google Earth view of Elk Island

Clockwise from bottom Phil, Ninon, Scott, Jenny.

Joggers drenched in early morning sweat steamed into then lay cooling in our put in's still frigid water while us four, paddlers packed and launched for Elk Island.
The rumor of rising afternoon winds still a myth never to materialize as we set out to circumnavigate a small provincial park in Manitoba's "Prairie Ocean".
Located in the outer reaches of the Winnipeg River's estuary the island's landscape is littered with "glacial erratic" boulders, limestone outcroppings and Lake Winnipeg's famous sand beaches. All accessible only by water.

Ninon heads from the put in to the Island as a flock of Pelicans rise off her bow.

Pelicans, Vultures, Eagles and Bear tracks pacing our beach lunch spot all punctuated our lazy six hour, nine nautical mile, circumnavigation.

Scott and Jenny parallel Elk Island's east shoreline.

Running north along Elk's east shore beach sifts from flat bar to 20 and 30 foot sandy cliffs. Vultures ride thermals here and towards the north east point Bald Eagles are often spotted. We were rewarded today with two, one juvenile then another, mature.

Jenny and Scott glide along sand cliffs.

As we coasted quietly around that point waterscape is blue sky merging on the horizon with lake.
Punctuated with guano stained boulders.
These are Eagle feeding stations,
I've watched the birds of prey feast on seagull and fish on these rocks.

North past the island lake and sky merge.

Scott drifts on a rare mirrored surface of Lake Winnipeg

More to come......

Spring Training

Dawn (left) dressed for immersion while Jon (right) laughed in fate's face. They flank "The usual list of suspects", with lead instructor Mick Lautt center right leading the charge! Apprenticing Instructor Trainer Jamie Hilland center left.
H'yup!

For most of us it was the first spring paddle, ice still covered most lakes and rivers in Manitoba. The pond we trained in and on only ice free for a few days, when Wilderness Supply's / WAVPaddling's first course of the season got underway May 7th.

It was of course an instructor's program featuring the usual fun and games.

Six candidates rose to the cold water challenge, five were left swimming after the water cleared. Various stages of completion remain, final tasks for certification.

For most, completing a course outline and assisting on a certified Paddle Canada "Introduction to Kayaking" program, will get them out introducing more to the sport.

As always the program featured the unusual rituals and a complicated secret initiation ceremony.

Instructor Trainers Mick and Phil
Damn water IS cold, I froze my stash!

Mick Lautt, lead Instructor Trainer.

Welcome all our new instructor candidates to the
Paddle Canada Program!

Eskimo whizzamagijig
-label circa 1940 for an ivory spear tip
in the MacMillan Collection, Provincetown

Optimism, in a strange,
American way, this zippy
caption for what was foreign
beyond language.

Thingamabob. Doohickey
distant as the need
for a haasux
(spear thrower in Aleut)
or a unaaq (Inupiaq pole
to check ice thickness).

This tool (perhaps a sakku)
clever and useless to the secretary
(was it Miriam?) who typed
the label that has yellowed.

Widget. Whatzit...

but some words drift.

Take vaxa gididzagh, Athabaskan for
that with which things are spread and so now butter knife.
Or lastax--fermented fur seal flipper--
now a three-petaled gizmo
that spins beneath a boat.

And consider the kayak,
translated through fibreglass
and rotomould,
neoprene and rubber.
Bright alchemy
that's made it whizzamajig
to it's own source.

-Elizabeth Bradfield

**Poem as appeared in March/April "Orion"
Photos by the blogger.**

In his book, "Arctic Dreams", Barry Lopez writes.... "The edges of any landscape quicken an observer's expectations. That attraction to borders, to the earth's twilit places is part of the shape of human curiosity."

It's mid-February and looking east from Hecla Village, on the shore of Hecla Island, only horizon arcs edge to edge, across and past my peripheral vision. My retina registers the meeting of sky and lake as a thin black line of nothing.

Unbroken horizon. Unbroken sky. Unbroken lakescape.

In mid summer that line might be defined by a distant sail, waves breaking on themselves or an approaching storm front's heap of cumulus.

Boundaries by definition break a pattern, here mid-winter, the pattern remains unbroken, sky and Lake a concert.



My last visit to Punk was a passage past, leading a group of kayak's from east to west along a handrail of Islands girdling the throat of the Lake. We paddled a lake void of movement but our own. A humid mist enchanting the August long weekend Lakescape.

Hazy passage past Punk Island /05

Trudging today on snowshoes, through blinding clarity, I turn west and leave Hecla Island near Sunset Beach to find the pattern broken by Punk Island and it's small accomplice Little Punk, each a nautical mile offshore to the north west, bearing 335 magnetic from the beach.

Punk Island emerges on the horizon.

I've brought compass and map with bearings and reverse bearings for this trek.

This Lake is a trickster any season.
Squalls, winter and summer can obscure the navigable breaks in this pattern in minutes leaving one exposed, directionless and quite possibly, ... dead.

Today though comes with a favorable forecast, little wind, lots of sun.
Noon's temperaure read -20C, not to bad by Manitoba's mid-winter standards.













The nautical mile, an easy twenty minute paddle in August, an hour's walk on ice and snow today and a lone birch becomes beacon as I near the southern center of punk.













Tracks and trails cris-cross a line parallel the island shore, a pair of tracks that in antarctica might betray a penquin's march. Here a freshwater Otter and mate slide across the frozen lakescape taking one, two maybe three steps before pushing off from leg to belly to leg again.


I follow the pair, nearly straight west from Punk's south tip to Little Punk where they continue on, disappearing into that "thin black line". Little Punk is more limestone lichen and birch, ice covering it's gravel shore. After exploring I stop offshore for a snack and tea from my thermos.

Mid-hike break


Checking my return bearing I head back to Hecla and Sunset Beach, if my bearing's are true my own tracks should intersect just before I make landfall.

Sun and Hecla

As I wander imaginary magnetic lines of converging trails, the sun keeps to it's low arc in the southern sky, bright and reflecting off the Lake's snow and ice I wonder if I should have packed sunscreen, now deep in storage with paddles and PFD's.

True to my bearing about an hour later I trudge across my own trail about 50 meters off Sunset Beach. Punk and Little Punk on the horizon behind me now.

Converging out and in bound trails


Back at my car the thermometer reads -16C, a good day for a walk.