A scary scene took place on Friday when Dallas Stars prospect Matej Blumel was hit hard into the boards and laid motionless on the ice during the first period. The players immediately knew something was wrong and the trainers rushed to the young winger.
Blumel was hit by San Jose Sharks prospect Ozzy Wiesblatt. This is the play in which the Stars’ prospect was sent to the ice and did not move.
Blumel was taken off the ice on a stretcher and immediately sent to the hospital on the ambulance. There was a delay in the game before it resumed.
Dan Bartoli is a Canadian superdude. By day, he is a soft-spoken, mild-mannered electrical engineer who works for a global manufacturing conglomerate. From the company’s outpost in a Peterborough, Ont., industrial park, he designs and builds tiny, mundane machines. “We make instruments that measure volume and level using ultrasound,” he tells me. I had no idea such contraptions existed, but apparently, lots of companies need lots and lots of them, and they’re not cheap. The work has kept him busy, endlessly improving his mousetrap for decades.
But once he clocks out from work, Dan seeks out adventure, attempting feats of derring-do using way cooler gadgets. He is fit and lithe, seemingly without an ounce of body fat, a late-fifties guy with the cut physique of eternal youth. Only the salt-and-pepper hair hints at his years. On this mid-March weekend, we are at his cottage north of Buckhorn, Ont., on the shores of Gold Lake. A snug log cabin hideaway is built atop a massive granite slope, but the little wooden shed down by the lake is where he keeps his gear.
The day is cold but cloudless, and the lake is blanketed by a thick sheet of ice and a cushion of fresh snow. Dan’s wearing mirrored Ray-Bans to filter the bright sunlight bouncing off the white horizon, nothing but middle-aged chill. He grabs his alpine boots and slips them on, even though there’s no chairlift within an hour’s drive. Then he pulls out his skis, leaving the poles behind, and grabs the mystery gear—a waist-high duffle bag weighing less than seven pounds, along with what looks like a bicycle pump on steroids.
With pump in hand, skis slung over one shoulder and duffle bag over the other, Dan walks it all out to the middle of the frozen bay. Most guys with gear to show off can’t stop talking about it, but Dan doesn’t say a word. He is not a talker to begin with (a trait common to both mild-mannered men and their alter egos), and his silence heightens the anticipation. He drops the bag onto the ice, unzips it, and reveals his superpowered contraption. It looks like what you might get if you crossed a windsurfer with a hot-air balloon: a mast-less, hand-held triangular kite with an inflatable skeleton. Is it a bird? A parachute? No! It’s…an Armstrong A-Wing with a 5.5 m² surface area.
Dan blows up the wing’s airframe in two minutes flat with less than 100 pumps. He lays his skis on the ground, snaps his boots into their bindings, holds the wing above his head, and he’s off. It’s not a particularly windy day—not even windy enough to require the harness he sometimes uses—but the wing is so light and manoeuvrable that he can hold it at whatever angle best captures the breeze to propel him forward. He’s doing something I previously thought impossible: downhill skiing without a downhill slope, gliding effortlessly on a bald flat lake.
Photo by Liam Mogan
Game changer
The inflatable wing, though built for summer, is the winter cottage toy we’ve all been waiting for
Photo by Liam Mogan
Get hooked
In strong winds, Dan uses a windsurfing harness
to keep his arms from getting fatigued. The harness hooks onto a rope that hangs between the wing’s handles. The rope releases when he pulls the wing in close.
Standing beside me out on the ice, Dan’s wife of 34 years, Cindy, gets a chuckle out of my amazement. “You may have noticed he’s a quiet guy,” she says, “but this is what gets him woohooing.” Cindy is the chatty one in the relationship, the artist to his engineer, an amateur photographer and writer.
They’ve always been active as a couple, but Dan’s the adrenaline junkie. You should see him, she tells me, when there’s some real gusts for him to lean into, when he can slalom, spin, and practically achieve liftoff. “The first time he ever tried it was in the farmer’s field behind our neighbourhood in Peterborough,” she says. “It was very windy, but he got the hang of it fast.” As she was watching him test his wing from their bedroom window, she recalls, a neighbour texted her. “She says, ‘You gotta check this out! There’s this guy out in the field…What is that thing he’s holding? Is he on…skis? What he’s doing is unbelievable!’ She was watching him through her binoculars. She didn’t know it was Dan.”
Photo by Liam Mogan
Cozy up
The outdoors is never far from mind, even when curled up by the fire, thanks to a great collection of nature-inspired art, such as Cindy’s mom’s Bradford Exchange wildlife plates.
Photo by Liam Mogan
All are Welcome
Dan and Cindy warm up in the living room. Two futons, Ikea chairs, and a rocking bench and chair give plenty of seating for times when their kids (Jake, 31; Trevor, 29; and Sadie, 27) visit.
Photo by Liam Mogan
Treasure Trove
The cottage is an inspiring repository for Dan and Cindy’s collection of natural history books, found treasures, and other artwork.
Photo by Liam Mogan
A Snowy View
The south-facing picture window is framed by big,
mature oaks, so the cottage has the benefits of shade in summer and maximum light through the winter months.
Winter cottaging is not for everyone, but as the saying goes, those who like it, like it a lot. Cindy and Dan Bartoli’s cottage isn’t fully winterized; its central heating system is a woodstove, supplemented as necessary by portable electric heaters. But they love it here in winter. Once the fire is roaring and dinner’s in the oven, the open-concept living area cozies up and holds the heat nicely. As a bonus, the leafless winterscape provides an even better view of the bay.
The property was initially purchased by Cindy’s mother and her aunt, Peggy and Carol Noyes, who, in 1952, snapped up one-and-a-half acres of just-released Crown land with 400 feet of waterfront. The lot cost $143.70, plus a survey fee of $80.50—Cindy still has the receipts. The sale was conditional upon the construction of a private summer cottage within 18 months and valued at no less than $500. Peggy and Carol bought a prefab kit for a 20-by-24 foot structure from Peterborough Lumber and built it with the help of Peggy’s boyfriend, William Wakeford, who promptly purchased the smaller neighbouring lot and built an identical prefab on it six years later.
Theirs is an iconic Peterborough love story: Peggy worked at Quaker and Bill at General Electric, the city’s two largest employers at the time, and whose massive manufacturing plants still dominate the cityscape (though GE’s beautiful red-brick buildings, built in the late 19th century, are now mostly empty—the company shut down its Peterborough operations in 2018). They met and married at Mark Street United Church in Peterborough’s East City neighbourhood, and had three kids who spent their summers with their cousins at the Gold Lake cottage in the Kawartha highlands. The provincial park of the same name, originally an 18 sq. km postage stamp on the map, was expanded in 2003 to 375 square clicks that now borders their lake.
Cindy loved exploring that wilderness as a kid—“It was our playground growing up,” she says. Her childhood cottage experience was rustic in the true sense of the word: no running water and an outhouse. “Whenever we complained, my mother would just say, ‘It builds character.’ It became a family punchline.” Stubbed toe? Dunked canoe? Poison ivy rash? Lose big at cards? It builds character.
Photo by Liam Mogan
Going the Distance
Once the ice is in, Dan and Cindy love to ski into
Kawartha Highlands Provincial Park, which abuts Gold Lake. ”We can go farther, faster on skis than we can by paddling and portaging,” says Cindy.
Photo by Liam Mogan
A Dog for All Seasons
Cottage dog Bruce (on the right), a Pomsky
belonging to the couple’s daughter, loves to play
outdoors all year, unlike Rosco (left), their Yorkie-
Bichon.
Photo by Liam Mogan
Blue View
In warmer weather, Dan and Cindy grill on the deck overlooking the lake.
Cindy and Dan met as third-year undergrads at Queen’s University in the mid-eighties, at a girls-night-in house party where Dan and his buddies were dressed up and serving dinner for the gals. After they’d been dating a while, she brought him up to Gold Lake for what she called the cottage relationship test: “If he can spend a week with an outhouse and no shower and still wants to come back, he might be a keeper.” (This test is really just another way of saying, “It builds character.”) Dan passed this test with honours; he and Cindy wed in 1988.
Around that same time, Peggy and Bill engineered a property deal: they traded Bill’s smaller neighbouring cottage to Carol for her share of the original cottage. That deal cleared the way for a rebuild: in 1991, 40 years after it was originally built, Peggy and Bill tore down the prefab and built the current one in its place, with a spacious porch, a hot shower, and four bedrooms surrounding the open-concept living area. And perhaps best of all, the woodstove made it possible to come up in winter.
Cindy and Dan are four-seasons-active people, preferring human-powered activities to motorized ones: canoeing over boating, Nordic skiing over snowmobiling. “But for as long as I’ve known Dan, he’s always had an affinity for wind,” Cindy says. He learned to sailboard as a teenager growing up in Sudbury, Ont., and though he’s been doing windsports his entire life, he still struggles to describe why he loves it. “The engineer in me is fascinated by the physics of it,” he says. “There’s just something about the power in the wind, when you’ve got the harness on and everything is balanced and the wind is pulling you, and you’re just flying along.” No one who sails is ever bored by sailing. Every wind is unique, and using it to power your vessel is always a test of physical and mental acuity. Even when you spill, it’s a great natural high.
But windsports are almost invariably summer sports. The only exceptions to this rule are kite skiing and ice boating, activities that entail a lot of complicated gear (the ropes on the kite are an ordeal all on their own), technical knowledge, and potential injury. Furthermore, kiting requires a very large body of frozen water, while ice boating requires a very large body of frozen water without any snow on it, which is a tall ask. They’re fussy sports. Neither is the kind of activity most cottagers can do from their waterfront.
The inflatable wing, though it was built for use on water, is the game-changing winter cottage toy that we’ve all been waiting for.
Its development was part and parcel of the recent decade-long wave in water sport innovation, including the stand-up paddleboard and the foilboard, which is basically a surfboard with a hydrofoil riveted to its underside, allowing it to rise out of the water when moving at speed. And with each of those inventions, the adrenaline junkies could only watch and wonder: wouldn’t it be cool if that thing had wings?
The key to the invention of the wing, which didn’t exist until a few years ago, was the inflatable-strut technology that forms its skeleton, which is rigid enough to catch the wind but light enough for any 14-year-old to hold over their head. The first commercial wing was introduced to the market in 2018, and it’s surprisingly affordable for such a new technology: anywhere from $700 to $2,000.
Their popularity has also been propelled by Covid-19. In fact, it was in the midst of lockdown-enforced web surfing ennui when Dan first discovered them. “We were going to go to Aruba with another couple to learn to kiteboard in the winter of 2020, but that trip fell through,” he recalls. That’s when he found some videos of winter wingers on skis and snowboards. The advantages, he says, were obvious right away. “There’s no way I could kite ski at the cottage because the lake’s not big enough. But I knew the wing could work.” He bought his A-Wing online for $1,300. Shortly thereafter, he was out in the field wowing his neighbours and, soon after that, woohooing on a frozen Gold Lake, just like he is now.
There’s only one way to end a day of winging on the lake, and that’s in the sauna. (This, by the way, is where I learned how ripped Dan is.) It’s a wood-fueled barrel sauna manufactured in Ontario by Dundalk Leisure Craft. Cindy and Dan bought it in 2018, and thanks to both the sauna and the wing, they spend more of their winter weekends at the cottage than ever before. Dan’s mother was Finnish, so affinity for saunas runs in his blood.
Photo by Liam Mogan
Some Like it Hot
Dan and Cindy relieve sore muscles after an active day on the ice.
Photo by Liam Mogan
Some Like it Cold
The author tries an icy plunge.
Once Dan gets the sauna fire roaring, he pulls out some more cool gadgets, an auger and a giant saw, to cut a hole in the ice for a cold bath. In keeping with their ethos, they’re 100 per cent human powered, no batteries or ripcords allowed. Dan’s got the system down: he draws a big triangle on the ice, drills a hole at one point, then saws straight lines between it and the other two points.
After 20 minutes in the dry sauna heat, it’s time for a dip. With total calm, Dan walks out to the triangle and lowers himself into the freezing water. He basks in it for a while before returning to the sauna. Steam rises off him like a slow-simmering human torch. I, on the other hand, a polar-bear-dip novice, can barely keep my composure as my lungs shrivel up in the water, then scamper back to the sauna like a lizard on its hind legs.
The best thing about winter winging, Dan tells me, is its accessibility. If you can ski or snowboard, you can do it. “You don’t need lessons for winging like you do with kiting,” says Dan. “It’s really easy.” There’s some learning to do when it comes to harnessing the wind—Dan can talk endlessly about optimal angles and wind direction—but you figure out the basics pretty quick.
And snow is probably a better surface for learning windsports than water. There’s no ducking under a swinging boom; no falling into the lake; no hauling yourself back onto a sailboard; no uprighting a soaked, heavy sail; no falling back in when you can’t find your balance; no deerflies biting your ankles through the entire ordeal. When you’re winter winging, you just tumble onto your kiester in the snowy cushion like you would on the slopes, and then you get back up and keep going.
Cindy is not the type to dote over or worry for her husband, but she definitely recognizes the advantages of his winter hobby. She tells me about the many injuries Dan has sustained while windsporting in summer—wrenched ankles, jammed fingers—but he won’t stop unless he’s bleeding. “Winter winging is safe,” she says, “and it has really opened up the season for him and for us.” There has never been a lower price to pay, in terms of money or risk of injury, for the adrenaline rush of windsports. It’s enough to make anyone feel super.
Want to try winging? Here’s how to get started
Look for smooth, packed snow in an open area such as a lake or field (bigger is better). In softer snow conditions, wider skis or a snowboard will work better.
Photo by Liam Mogan
Skis: Dan says he bought his skis about 20 years ago for some trips out west and hadn’t used them much in the last several years. “So winging was the perfect reason to dust them off,” he says. “Any set of skis or a snowboard will work for wing skiing.” Dan’s gear: Skis are Head C10s, and boots are Alpina
Harness: A windsurfing harness and line for the wing will allow you to cruise all afternoon without tiring. Dan’s waist harness: Dakine
Wing: “There is now a huge selection of wings online,” says Dan. According to Jean-Robert Wilhelmy, co-owner of windshop.ca, before you buy, you should think about whether you’ll be using it in winter and summer, how much wind your area gets, and whether the lake tends to have a lot of waves. Wings are measured by area in square meters in a range of sizes, such as 2 m² at the low end and 7 m² in the upper range. You also need to factor in your weight and experience; as they go up, so can the size of the wing. “To start, you need a beginner-intermediate wing that is quite powerful to get you going, such as the Freewing Go or the Takuma Concept,” says Wilhelmy. He recommends a 4.3 m² to 4.5 m² wing for lighter weight and 5.2 m² to 5.5 m² for medium to heavy. “A wing that’s too big gets very tiring and heavy on the arms, and if it’s too small, it won’t make you move.” He suggests taking lessons at the beginning and starting with a good wind to help you get going fast. Dan’s wing: Armstrong A-Wing 5.5 m²
This story was originally published as “The Wing King” in the Winter 2022 issue of Cottage Life.
For some, it means a day off from school. For others, it’s a signal that skiing season is starting. Or maybe it’s a harbinger of an extra long commute to work. It’s remarkable how many memories and emotions can be evoked by a few billion tiny ice crystals.
We may see snow as a blanket or drifts across the landscape or our driveway. But when was the last time you took a closer look at snow, and I mean a really close look?
Many a writer has mused about snowflakes as a natural work of art. Here’s a scientific look at the amazing nature of snowflakes and snow.
The dendrite form is a study in water chemistry. When ice forms at the molecular level, the angle between the hydrogen and oxygen atoms will always be 120 degrees; put three of these together to get a full ring of molecules with a six-sided structure. In fact, every time a water molecule attaches itself to this ring, it will do so at the same angle.
As the snowflake grows, the attachment of water molecules is determined by the temperature and humidity of the air. Since these characteristics don’t change too much at the size of a growing snowflake, those attachments tend to occur evenly across the six points of the hexagonal flake.
Molecule by molecule, the snowflake grows and eventually begins to fall. This takes the snowflake to a new part of the atmosphere, where temperature and humidity are different, resulting in new ice structures forming, but still with the same set of angles.
Video about ice and snow crystal growth with physics professor Ken Libbrecht.
Is each snowflake really unique?
A typical dendrite is made up of about a quintillion (that’s a one with 18 zeroes after it) individual water molecules. Given slight changes in temperature and humidity and the huge number of molecules and bonding opportunities involved, the ice structures created can be incredibly diverse and complicated.
For this reason, it is entirely likely that no two snowflakes form in exactly the same way, and consequently no two snowflakes are alike.
Why is some snow light and fluffy and some is heavy?
The story of snow crystal growth doesn’t end high above in the clouds. Once the snowflakes reach the ground and accumulate as a blanket of snow, they begin to change.
Freshly fallen snow tends to be light and fluffy because the flakes take up a lot of space and there is a lot of air between and within them. But over time, they break apart, pack tighter together and the density increases.
This process is known as sintering and is useful for building snow shelters like igloos and quinzees. But some of the most remarkable changes happen at the bottom of the snowpack, where warmth from the ground below and cold from the air above interact.
Through a process of sublimation—water molecules change from ice directly to vapour, skipping the liquid phase—and refreezing, cup-shaped crystals a few centimetres across known as depth hoar can form. Though beautiful to look at, depth hoar has a low density and when it forms on a steep slope there is a chance for the snowpack to slide as an avalanche.
So next time you’re out in the snow, even if you’re grumbling about having to shovel the driveway for the umpteenth time this winter, take a moment to catch a snowflake on your mitten and have a look at it. You’re looking at a formation
no one has ever seen before.
Cottage Life Photo Contest Entry by Brian Prentice
It is late September and the day is achingly beautiful. The sun is rising, the mist lifting. The wind is down and in my canoe I slide north along the shore. I have no destination except eternity.
At this hour and this time I am the only boat on the lake, but not the only life. A kingfisher rattles out of the back channel behind the island on which I live. I know the young loon is out there fishing and, through the mist, I can hear the flocks of geese heading south: some to migration, others to termination in the marshes where the hunters wait. Like me, the hunters are up early.
The geese are not the only high flyers. Already jet trails are drawn in the sky and by the end of today they, or others more recent, will still be hanging, ragged but motionless.
I glide across the mouth of a small bay and head east down a long finger of the lake. There are cottages along the north shore and though most are shut, smoke rises slowly from one chimney. I feather my paddle and go softly. My real hope is to sneak up on a deer at the water’s edge, but I am always happy to slip by some cottagers’ dock and startle them with a “good morning” in this seemingly empty scene. I have no luck today, but once in Haliburton I floated silently up to an early morning fisherman with his back turned and nearly good-morninged him right out of his boat. The joys of canoeing.
There is no fisherperson in this bay—it is far too shallow. The canoe glides over rocks and logs and beer cans and old tires and Styrofoam cups. I know people, concerned and committed, who would fetch up the smaller pieces of garbage and pack them out. For a moment I feel badly that I am not one.
I paddle almost to the end of the bay in six inches of water and then turn around. The only animals I see are a red squirrel swimming across the bay and mink flowing over a rocky shoreline. As I head out of the bay I take off my gloves. They were necessary an hour ago; the temperature was 40°F . Now the mist is burned off and the sun has real warmth. On the way back I talk to a cottager on the south shore who has watched me approach. Ordinary, meaningless conversation but it fills me with importance, for he is standing on the deck of his cottage drinking coffee and I am kneeling in a cedar-canvas canoe, leaning forward on my paddle across the middle thwart. The joys of canoeing.
This cottager is only up for a long weekend or perhaps, although I don’t ask, for a bit of hunting. He is younger than the cottagers I might see midweek, for most of them are retired—snowbirds who spend six months at the cottage and six months in Florida. As September folds into October I will see fewer and fewer lights along the shore. Indeed, there aren’t many after Thanksgiving.
When I was young, Labour Day marked the end of the cottage year, but Thanksgiving is now the time for pulling out water lines and having that last big cottage meal. Thanksgiving is such a popular time in the Kennisis lakes that in the early 90s, before Hydro beefed up its service, you could count on the power to fail on the weekend when every cottagers put the turkey in the oven at about the same time.
Not that the weather changes much with the arrival of Thanksgiving. Yes, it gets slightly cooler and there is a risk of frost, but the oaks and maples are still glorious and the sky only a slightly harder blue—precursor of the ice blue of winter. The loon still fishes and the great blue heron stalks slowly along the shore. Small flocks of mergansers run over the water and the birds of winter—chickadees, juncos, nuthatches, woodpeckers—are more noticeable. Red squirrels are manic, darting up the white pines and zooming down with cones clamped like fat cigars in their mouths. But those zoomers of summer, the hummingbirds, have long gone. They left shortly after Labour Day.
The confusing fall warblers have already been through on their migration. They popped in and out of the trees on the island for a couple of days, and I sought them with my binoculars but without much success. Flashes of yellow, flashes of black and white. Easier to see are the butterflies, fluttering through for almost a week, orange and black, and smaller than monarchs. I decide they must be painted ladies. I could be wrong.
The other sign of the changing season is the wind. It comes from the west and the north, sometimes from both at the same time. It pours down, creating a vicious cross-chop on the lake; not weather for canoeing and a time for caution in any boat. It drives through every crack in my cottage and sometimes ravens through the night. Mindful of the tornadoes of summer, I have arisen several times in the autumn night and sat reading with a candle at the ready, waiting for a tree to fall and the power to fail. Looking out on the black lake, seeing no lights, feeling alone. Indeed, being alone.
Oh, I know there are several permanent residents three miles to the north and at least one tucked around a corner about half a mile to the east. But that’s half a mile by water and about five miles by road. If I had a road.
Instead, I have a trail. Because of the wind on the lake, I am no longer heading west to the marina across two miles of open water. Instead, I cross the narrow back channel to the east. I pull my canoe into the bush and follow the trail my daughters and I carved in the forest. This takes me to a spur road, which leads to the main cottage road that runs up the eastern side of this chain of lakes. I don’t look forward to road travel when winter comes. Too many hills, too many corners. Too slippery.
And by the end of October winter has shown that this year it plans to come early and stay late. The overnight temperature has been around freezing and the days are cooling off. In mid-October I could sit outside in the early afternoon sun. Not so as the month ended. There have been tentative snowfalls, usually gentle. So gentle that I have canoed into them, sliding along the now mostly barren shore. The water is black, the sky is grey, the trees are dark green, and the snow white. Words do not paint a picture. This scene too is beautiful, stark, like a burial under black umbrellas. Necessary and right and sad.
Now I canoe along the shore and there is no-one to talk to. No cottagers having coffee, no workers fixing decks or docks. No-one fishing, no boats. I hug the shore, for even though the wind is still and the canoe secure, I know the water is cold. I concentrate on what I am doing and I keep my considerable centre of gravity low.
But, ah, the pleasure of the solitary canoe. A couple of neighbours who came up on the weekend kindly invite me to Saturday night dinner at their cottage on a mainland point. Not the best night, rain mixed with snow and the wind rising. They are surprised when I grate onto their waterfront, hauling the canoe onto a thin cushion of snow, and they are somewhat apprehensive at the thought of my return journey. So am I, but I say nothing and eat everything they offer—roast chicken, potatoes, green beans, salad, cheesecake—borrow a few books, thank them, and return into the night. Paddling through a protected channel, aiming for the light in my boathouse. Knowing I have nothing really to worry about. But the night is so dark and the water so black, a drift of snow in the boat. I am anxious to finish the short journey, but at the same time I am thinking that at nine o’clock on a Saturday night in late October, I am likely the only person travelling by canoe in all the Kawartha Highlands. Maybe in all Ontario. The joys of canoeing.
Now we are into November and winter is all but here. For much of the autumn there had been people working, renovating, clearing trees around the lake. I could hear the screech of the circular saw and the reverberation of hammers, but now it is cold. Cold and grey, not pleasant weather. No canoeing for fun. The land is empty.
The month has seven days to run when the reality of winter hits. It is eight in the morning and the temperature is 4°F. Cold. The wind, which roared all night, is down, the mist thick, the water still and black and oily. Viscous. I cross over the spine of the island towards the back channel and the boathouse and stop. Glorious. The trees are covered in spray or frost and shining as the morning sun hits them. The ground is dusted with snow. My eye catches the water in the protected channel by the boathouse; it is still and black but not oily. Frozen. From shore to shore.
I go down to the boathouse where the boats are frozen in the water and the knots frozen in the mooring rings. I poke at the ice with the end of a paddle—it bounces off. The ice is surprisingly thick. I step carefully into my old red canoe and rock it free of ice; then I push forward. The canoe slides up onto the ice and sits there. The ice is far too thick to walk on and far too thick to break easily. I take an axe from the boathouse and cut myself a channel, leaning out from the bow of the boat. Not easy. Ah, the joys of canoeing.
I crouch with my axe in the bow of the red canoe alone in the back channel. The ice is picking up the sunlight, turning from slate grey to silver. Snow lies on the ground, the sky is blue, and the green pines and hemlock are tipped with silver turning to gold.
At this time I am likely the only person in the Kawartha Highlands, perhaps in all of Ontario, cutting his way through the ice. Winter has come to cottage country and it is most truly a beautiful day.
This essay was published as “Same old lake, fresh new season” in theWinter 2020 issue of Cottage Life.
Related Story Muskoka teen paddles 400 km for wildlife
Ah, the “off-season” at the lake. The peace. The quiet. The wildlife crossing pristine ice—ah, yes, the ice. In 2019, winter ice damage and spring floods left cottagers scrambling to protect and repair shoreline structures. Katie Peet of R & J Machine in Lakefield, Ont., says that they fielded several calls from cottagers looking to install de-icers. “If they have a couple of feet of water, they can put one in to open up ice so it can’t be pushed and piled on the shoreline,” she says. “Some people use a chainsaw to open up the ice, but you may have to do that every day because it freezes over again at night.”
Winter is coming
Ice expands as it melts, until it turns to water. Cracks will form in lake ice in response to the different expansion rates caused by warmer temperatures at the top. An ice sheet gets bigger as water flows from underneath up into the cracks and then freezes. With successive freeze-thaw cycles, that ice moves toward shore, shoving up anything in its way—docks, boathouses—in a process called ice-heave or ice-jacking. Spring flooding can also drive thick ice into shoreline structures.
Bottom line Winter ice is a natural fact of cottage life, but, unfortunately, the damage it causes is a standard exclusion to most insurance policies. “People seem not to be aware of that,” says Allison Bryce, with insurance brokerage The Magnes Group. She advises clients to install de-icing systems to protect a shoreline investment that can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Keeping the ice away
A properly installed de-icer will create as small an opening as possible while still keeping structures free of ice. The systems come in two forms: impellers and bubblers. Impeller de-icers, such as the Kasco and Arbrux systems, combine a motor with a propeller enclosed in a cage that is suspended by ropes or a bracket from a dock or float. The angle of the unit can be adjusted, and which size motor you choose depends on the temperature and the depth of the water (you may need more than one device).
Bubbler de-icers, like Canadian Pond’s Thawline linear system, use a compressor on shore to feed air through submerged tubing. Brent Statten, of DeiceAir in Huntsville, Ont., which installs both Kasko and Thawline systems, is a fan of aeration. “It’s like a tailored suit,” he says, “custom fit to snake around docks and open up only the minimum amount of water necessary.” Bubbler systems use less power than impellers, with no electricity in the water or moving parts to get clogged with sticks, debris, or even ice. And bubblers can be left in place all year (as can impellers, but they’re unsightly).
Bottom line Get advice from companies that sell the systems, even if you plan a DIY installation. Often people wait until the last minute to install them, Statten says, rather than planning their site out and taking time with the installation. Do it before it gets cold, he advises, “and obviously before the ice sets in.”
This one’s on you
Though not highly regulated by municipalities, de-icers are prohibited on some waterways, such as some administered by Parks Canada. At the very least, bubblers are controversial in cottage country. Chris Collings, a bylaw enforcement officer for the Township of Lake of Bays, Ont., says that he often gets complaints about installations that create open water near snowmobile routes or about hazard lights that bother other property owners. But while your municipality may not control the use of de-icers, Section 263 (1) of Canada’s Criminal Code says, “Every one who makes or causes to be made an opening in ice…is under a legal duty to guard it in a manner that is adequate to prevent persons from falling in by accident and is adequate to warn them that the opening exists.” If you fail to do that, and a death occurs as a result, you could be charged with manslaughter. But what’s “adequate” is not specified. The experts we consulted recommend marking any opening with signs (in all directions), reflective tape, and flashing amber lights (not red, which could be mistaken for the tail lights of a snowmobile).
Check with your local municipality before installing a system. Even if there isn’t a de-icer regulation, there may be other restrictions. Lake of Bays, for example, has a dark-skies bylaw that requires all outdoor lights to be shielded and facing downward, so flashing lights may be non-compliant. But Collings says you can install a downward-facing spotlight that illuminates a warning sign.
Bottom line As the Criminal Code makes clear, alerting lake users to the dangers of open water is serious business. So channel your inner Scout and be prepared. As Brent Statten says, “No one wants to think that winter is coming, but it does every year.”
Vanilla Ice has been arrested and charged with burglary and theft.
The 47-year-old rapper – whose real name is Robert Van Winkle – was taken into custody by the Lantana Police Department and charged with burglary residence and grand theft following an alleged crime which occurred adjacent to a Florida home he was renovating for his ‘The Vanilla Ice Project’ DIY show.
Items including bicycles, a pool heater and furniture were taken from the property at some point between December and February, and some were later found at the ‘Ice Ice Baby’ hitmaker’s home after police searched his house.
The police department said in a statement: ”During the investigation, it was determined Robert Matthew Van Winkle played a role in the burglary and theft.
”Mr. Van Winkle is currently renovating the residence adjacent to the property in which the items were stolen.
”A search warrant was obtained and executed in unincorporated Palm Beach County in which several of the stolen items were recovered at a residence under the care and control of Robert Van Winkle.”
Since then, the stolen items have now been ”returned to their rightful owner”.
Police Chief Sean Scheller told The Hollywood Reporter that Ice – who shot to fame in the 1990s – was working with police to try to locate some of the missing items and he is said to have been very cooperative.
TMZ, which first reported the arrest, claims the arrest is related to the star’s reality show ‘The Vanilla Ice Project’ but a representative for the DIY Network has not commented on whether the property in question is related to the programme.
The rep said: ”DIY Network has been made aware of this situation and is currently looking into the matter.”
