Comments (0)

By Sadie, March 2, 2013 10:12 pm

This is my favorite picture that I’ve taken this winter. My island sisters and I would canoe out to these islands to picnic all of the time when we were younger. They look so different under a blanket of snow.

Comments (0)

By Sadie, February 18, 2013 7:16 pm

We spent Family Day weekend in Parry Sound with some friends of ours on the mainland. They still have their holiday tree up and on it were some fantastic ornaments. The Muskoka chair, Santa outhouse and canoe ornaments were my favorite.

Comments (0)

By Sadie, February 17, 2013 10:51 am

Here’s Action Island in all of its wintry glory. The ice is strong. We’ll be heading out there for a bit this afternoon.

Comments (0)

By Sadie, March 7, 2012 10:34 pm

I made my annual trip up north in February, but something was very different this year. For the first time in living memory, the bay didn’t freeze. Sometimes winters have more ice than others, but this one didn’t have any on the bay. The smaller channels had somewhat frozen water, but it still wasn’t very safe to walk on. When we go up north in the winter, we typically walk out to the island and hike sometimes for miles just wandering around on the ice. That couldn’t happen this year though. We didn’t have our kayaks with us, so kayaking to the island wasn’t an option either. Though it was so frustrating to see Action Island in all its chilly glory and not be able to get to it, we still all had a fun time hanging out with our mainland neighbors in Parry Sound.

The shore at our friends’ place:

Somewhat frozen water in a channel:

More at the shore:

The closest we could get to the island was viewing it with the zoom on my camera from the shore:

Comments (2)

By Sadie, March 4, 2011 7:51 pm

It’s good to see that I’m not the only one that’s ready for spring. We have open water on the river, but there’s still too much ice around the fence gate to get the kayaks out. Trust me. I’ve tried.

Comments (2)

By Sadie, March 6, 2010 3:20 pm

After hanging out at the cottage, we decided to go to the end of the island for a bit.

I was really surprised at the lack of fishing huts. Last time I came out here on the ice, there were probably around five just in this area.

You can only see one lone fishing hut way in the distance with a snowmobile parked in front of it.

Here’s a video that the husband made of our walk to the end of the island. It’s amazing how much more wind there is in the winter – not anywhere as much snow as there has been on previous visits though.

Comments (0)

By Sadie, March 6, 2010 2:31 pm

What a difference a few months can make. The same view is now a bit different. There’s a new temperature, new snow, a newly frozen over lake and a newly missing branch too.

The late summer view from the new window on the back porch:

and the winter view from the new back porch window:

Comments (0)

By Sadie, March 5, 2010 6:53 pm

We actually stayed at the cottage for a lot longer than we planned. We didn’t have anywhere to sit down on the porch, so instead of digging for the nice porch furniture and cushions that are hiding in the spare bedrooms for the winter, we found some of the outdoor plastic furniture and we set that up on the porch so we could all sit in our usual spots.

To warm up, we decided to turn on the propane and make some hot tea out of melted snow. We found out that there actually is a lot of air in snow. We were surprised that we only got a few mugs of tea out of all of this snow.

Though we were still a little chilly, we realized that life on the porch is the same year round:

Comments (0)

By Sadie, March 5, 2010 6:39 am

Once we made it to the island, it was good to see that there weren’t any fallen trees and that the buildings appeared to be in good shape.

No big trees on the cottage this winter:

Even the outhouse was holding up well. It looks like some fishermen used in during the fall (and perhaps recently too), but they kept it looking nice for our visit. I had to smile, when I found the door frozen open showing the sunny day on the bay paint job that we gave it last summer.:

A video – pardon the mess in the cottage. When we close the cottage for the winter, we have to put all of the porch stuff inside. That makes for a very cluttered cottage.:

Comments (0)

By Sadie, March 4, 2010 8:14 pm

After convincing the roommate that the ice was thick enough, we decided to head out to the island by foot. There’s something really weird about walking out on the ice. My perception is five feet off because I’m used to sitting in a boat when I see all of the usual landmarks, not standing up. Plus, it’s just weird walking on what should be water for over a mile.

We tried to stay in the snowmobile lanes as much as we could because the ice is thicker in them compared to the rest of the ice on the lake. This is because when the snow is compressed on the ice because of the weight of the snowmobiles, the snow loses its insulating qualities, making the ice easier to freeze there.

Here’s a view close to the mainland:

We would cut across land whenever we could:

And it started to snow:

Finally though, Action Island was in sight: