Indholdsfortegnelse for August/September 2019 i Cottage Life

Get the picture? Cameras at the ready: our photo contest is on. Enter for a chance to have your photo in the magazine (like the one at right), and to win one of our amazing prizes (totalling more than $3,500)! There’s no entry limit, so send us your sunset shots and doggy candids, we want them all. Submit your photos at cottagelife.com. THE COACH APPROACH You take the cottage seriously, but not too seriously—we get that, and so does our Cottage Coach, Adam Holman. One minute he’s building a flagpole and the next he’s fixing a deck board. If you want to learn a little and laugh a lot, you can watch all of Adam’s adventures at cottagelife.com/cottagecoach. A CAN-DO ATTITUDE We asked for your help on social media to…

ONE’S DIRECTIONS After reading “Captain Cottager, the Emergency Edition” (May ’19), I thought I would share my method for getting guests from the Barrie area to Petawawa, Ont., where our cottage is located. On one trip to the cottage, I took the time to measure each turn with my odometer. I returned home, accessed Google Earth, and took a screenshot of every intersection where you would turn and every landmark that was important on the trip. I put together a booklet with descriptions of where you were headed, a picture of the secenery at each turn, and how many kilometres are between them. I like to think it’s turned a long, difficult journey into a fun adventure in navigation.—Stephen McIntosh, via email A FLOOD OF SUGGESTIONS While the flooding in…

This spring, as historic flooding hit Central Ontario cottage country, Liz Beatty was grateful that her great-grandparents built their Lake Muskoka cottage on high ground and situated the boathouses on the lee side of the island. What’s more, she was grateful for whatever intuition prompted her to store her vintage boat on the mainland instead of in the boathouse. “Thank God I did,” she says, noting the stories and photos of high water and ice destroying boathouses and crushing boats against ceiling beams. Liz was among the thousands of cottagers (and homeowners) in Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick hit with flooding; the Insurance Bureau of Canada expects weather-related claims to top $1 billion this year. Many suffered property damage, ranging from disappeared docks, sagging boathouses, and collapsed structures. “Cottagers aren’t…

1 Cut the G1S plywood for your game surface and two pieces of lauan for your lid and base to 17¼" by 13¾". 2 Drill a ⅞" hole into one piece of lauan to make an easy-to-remove lid. Decorate as desired. The other lauan piece will be the base of the box. 3 Cut the remaining lauan into ½"-wide strips to use as your maze rails. 4 Cut bristol board to 17¼" by 13¾". Use a pencil to sketch a grid as illustrated in Fig. 1. Use our example or create your own pathway by shading in the 3/16" gaps for your maze rails. 5 Select spots on the path and trace a penny for each hole. (Ask a grandparent for a “penny.”) 6 Tape grid to game surface. Press…

ARE THE TICKS HERE? Our cottage is on an island, and the only mammals there are mice and voles. What is the probability that ticks are also on the island?—CAROLYN BEATON, VIA EMAIL It’s not high. “But it’s not zero,” says Robbin Lindsay, a research scientist with the Public Health Agency of Canada. Black-legged ticks—the ones that carry Lyme disease, and the ones we assume you’re concerned about—do feed on birds and, therefore, could be introduced practically anywhere those birds go. “But it’s rare that ticks would become established in a place with no white-tailed deer,” says Lindsay. While tick larvae and nymphs use mice and voles as hosts, adult ticks generally prefer deer. In places without any deer, tick numbers typically either crash completely, or remain low. “Adults just…

I built my bunkie from the ground up, but the thing that impresses my guests most is how the ends of the deck boards follow the shape of the adjacent rock. It looks amazing, but the technique is simple: scribing involves using a compass to transfer irregular contours to your workpiece, then cutting the shape so the piece fits snugly. Position a board so that it butts up to the rock. Run the pointy end of the compass against the rock so that the pencil end marks the same shape on the end of your board. Cut the shape with a jig saw, install, and repeat for each deck board. Be sure to account for the material you’ll be removing when cutting the overall length of the board. If the…

“MY FAMILY WANTS TO BUILD a new three-bay boathouse, but I’m panicking just thinking about how angry it’ll make our neighbours and how expensive it’ll be to repair every time there’s a flood or ice damage. Are boathouses even worth building?” You must be a very brave person to even suggest that building a boathouse might be a dumb idea. Boathouses are one of the pre-eminent symbols of cottagedom. To question their validity would be considered vile heresy by some, right up there with throwing rocks at a loon or plastering Hello Kitty stickers on a cedar-canvas canoe. The boathouse has always been an icon of Canadian cottage country, immortalized in art prints, coffee-table books, and magazines. What’s more cottagey than kids and dogs jumping off a boathouse dock? And…

i remember the exact moment when I decided that I would never go back to my family’s cottage ever, ever again. It was August 2000. I was 16 and sick of visiting the dusty, drafty old place in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains. Its incessant mothball smell was getting to me, especially because it never seemed to keep out the moths. My grandfather was also getting to me. In my mind, he ran the place as though it were some kind of WASP boot camp, setting out the strict daily regimen that my brother, myself, and our cousins followed on our summer visits. Between six and seven a.m., we had to be out of bed and in the freezing lake for our pre-breakfast swims. Then, after choking back flavourless bowls of porridge,…

In the wake of notably catastrophic forest fires across Canada in recent years, vast, swaying seas of pink have inundated many areas of blackened earth. Picturesque and possessed of phenomenal regenerative powers, fireweed may sprout within weeks of a burn. FIREWEED flourishes a hundred or more vibrant pink flowers along its sturdy stem, up to two metres tall, gradually blooming from the bottom up, through the summer and into September. They yield a highly prized honey and in northern regions are the most bountiful source of nectar for bees, butterflies, moths, and other insects. EACH FLOWER lasts for several days, producing pollen for the first, before filling with nectar and projecting a long, white female style. Bees fly to fireweed’s lower, nectar-rich older blossoms initially, then buzz up to the…

Way back in our June 1990 issue, longtime Cottage Life contributor Denny Manchee wrote the very thing that often rattles around in my brain: “It seems whenever I think about the cottage, I feel like an eight-year-old again and want so much for it to be the way it was when I was that age.” What cottager can’t relate to that? Even those who didn’t grow up at the lake, or haven’t watched a kid grow up at the lake, share that same sense of nostalgia. So much of the cottage exists only in our mind, because we are there so infrequently. It is a memory book of sorts, one that holds all of our favourite experiences—some from last summer, some from 30 summers ago. The first time we swam…

For more than a decade, the clump of lily pads with dainty yellow flowers lingered where it had been planted along the shore of Seymour Lake in northwest B.C. It wasn’t until groupings began to appear around the lake’s perimeter that locals realized they had a problem. “None of us knew the seriousness of it,” says Poppy Dubar, a lake resident. Now, Poppy and her neighbours are fighting the first known infestation of yellow floating heart west of Ontario. The invasive aquatic weed can be devastating in natural waterbodies; its thick mat of leaves depletes the lake of light and oxygen. In 2015, Poppy and other locals formed the Seymour Lake Conservation Society and began looking for a solution to stop the plant from spreading by seed and by fragmentation…

When Sean Thompson came back to the cottage on Whitestone Lake, Ont., with another old waterski from an antique store in Parry Sound, Ont., his wife, Sherry, could only shake her head. “I had already bought two skis that I didn’t know what to do with,” says Sean, “but this one had our family name, and it was a cool shape because it was a trick ski.” And the Thompsons did need some extra lighting over the kitchen sink, so Sean added three LED potlights, enclosed in their own CSA housing, drilled holes to feed the wire through the back and into the electrical box, and then added a dimmer switch. Keeping with the nautical theme, he screwed dock cleats to the ceiling and strung marine rope from the cleats…

Is there anything more traditional than a good old fireworks display at the cottage—kids running around in the dark, dogs cowering under the picnic table? Not much has changed, except for new varieties, like sky lanterns, and more rules now than there used to be. SO WHO MAKES THE RULES ANYWAY? The feds—Natural Resources Canada (NRC), to be specific, under the Explosives Act—determine which fireworks can be used in Canada and by whom. They may have the coolest names ever, but cherry bombs, snaps, M-80 salutes, flash crackers, throw-down torpedoes, cigarette loads, trick matches, sprite bombs, and firecrackers (unless you have a Firecracker Use Certificate from NRC) are all illegal. Don’t recognize the names? You’ll find helpful pictures on the Canadian National Fireworks Association (CNFA) website. Another tell: if the…

From the time he was three years old, Woodie Stevens has spent every summer of his life at his family cottage in the Thousand Islands, a 10-minute boat ride from Gananoque, Ont. But it wasn’t until his 20th summer at the cottage, when he thought he had the Thousand Islands all figured out, that the islands and the river reached out and spoke to him and changed the course of his life. Woodie, born Ford Woods Stevens, is today a 77-year-old American, a career dentist in the Philadelphia area, a gentle soul who can spin a good yarn. His cottage, which has been in the family for more than a century, sits atop the highest point on Wyoming Island, some 60 feet above the St. Lawrence River. It features an…

Connie Wahl has been going to the Shanty, on Stoney Lake, Ont., since the ’40s, but the cottage’s logbooks go back to 1897. “They’re the most valuable thing there,” she says. “Authors who’ve visited have wanted to make stories out of them.” They could start with this entry: “the house is in an uproar. Miss Ruth has just found Miss Paine under her bed…” Share your guest “book” photos on Instagram with #cottagelifesub or email us at edit@cottagelife.com.…