July 21, 2020

Hi Everybody,

Let me start off by apologizing for my absence, despite not having many customers around this summer we have been keeping remarkably busy. As awful as the current state of the world is, it’s a sort of once in a lifetime opportunity for us to be able to get caught up on a lot of maintenance. So far we have painted the ceilings in cabins 5 and 6, replaced the floor in the fish house, and have been renovating the lodge to be a more workable space. Before having built the new shop we had to store a lot of stuff that didn’t fit in the old shed in the house with us. This meant general disorganization and that our clothing inventory was actually stored across 3 different rooms and was a nightmare to sort through looking for a specific item. We have since moved all of the cleaning supplies out into the shop and completely outfitted that room to hang and organize all of the clothing. We have also gutted and built shelves in a small room in the back of the lodge that was solely used to house a heap of stuff we never used (you couldn’t even walk in there it was so crowded) and now Mom has a nice space to store all of the bedding. This should make us a lot more efficient and make our jobs a lot easier on Fridays and Saturdays.

Oh, and I almost forgot. We have also had a local contractor, Roger from Wintering Getaway, down doing some work on cabin 1 for us. We have not only gotten rid of that old terrible shower, but built a whole new bathroom on the back of the cabin and opened up the kitchen to make room for a pantry. We also updated the flooring throughout. We are waiting for the last of the materials which are on back order, but here are a few pics:

We hope to be able to do this to cabins 2-4 in the years to come as well. It really opens up the cabin.

All of this downtime has also given me the opportunity to spend a bit of time at my deer hunting cabin, fixing it up. The cabin has a good foundation being on bedrock, and all of the logs are solid, but it has sat relatively unused for a number of years and needs some TLC. We have gone down for 3 2 night trips this summer and have been able to seal all the gaps between the logs and have stripped the exterior of water damage and mildew and have it prepped and ready for stain.

Some of the logs had some gaps from the cabin settling out over the years and them not having been chinked. Most didn’t require any work, some were small and required some, and others were pretty large. Lindsay and I were able to pull out the existing insulation between the logs to clear the gaps and sealed them with spray foam. We will likely go back and chink the gaps that we had to seal after we stain as well. To clean the exterior of the cabin we used 7 gallons of Sansin Wood Cleaner and 191 gallons of water, brought in by ATV in jugs. It was a lot of work not having water and power as we had to use two deck sprayers and two scrub brushes to apply, scrub, and rinse the walls; but they turned out great!

Here are a couple of the older pictures I have already posted for reference, and the new clean walls:

The weather has mainly been hot and dry. And I do mean hot, we had probably two weeks that averaged over 90 F. Fortunately we have gotten a little bit of rain recently and it has cooled off a bit, it’s a very welcomed change for working around the yard. The fishing has remained very steady despite the hot weather though. Two weeks ago we actually had a full camp, as our regularly scheduled Canadian clients were here, in addition to a couple of new groups that came down for a long weekend. Everyone had a successful week fishing and we saw a few entries on the fish board. Nothing massive but a lot of nice 20-22″ walleye, and one very large 21″ bass!

Last weekend we were quiet so I had a bunch of friends up to celebrate Lindsay’s birthday. The weather was absolutely gorgeous. It was very hot and we had a blast playing yard games and got out for a pretty good days fishing. Especially since we weren’t working too hard for the fish and spent a good while swimming around the boats. Everyone had a blast and we had an awesome fish fry. Of course I’m terrible at remembering to take a picture of the fish before I start cleaning them, but here is the group that I had in my boat.

As far as the border closure goes, I’m sure everyone knows by now that it will be closed until August 21 at the earliest. To be completely honest, and this is just my personal opinion, I would be surprised to see it open at all this summer. We are remaining hopeful, but I don’t see the border being opened on our end until there is a large scale drop in cases in the US. Hopefully this mess is over soon.

Well that was a bit of a long winded post, but I think it is a pretty thorough recap of everything we have been up to since my last post. I’m going to try to get some more pictures of fish up on here and on our social media pages as I have had a few requests and have certainly been slacking. I hope everyone is doing well and staying healthy!

Ryan