Sunday, June 29, 2008

pre camp

well camp is starting in a week, and i will be heading off for staff camp on friday. I am there for all 5 weeks.
Here is a list of things that need prayer.
that God will work through us in ways never though possible, that the kids would hear and accept the word of God, that the seeds will be planted, that the camp will find all the staff that they need, that camp will fill up, protection from distractions the devil tries to throw at us, a witnessing heart that we will find ways to relate to the kids and really work with them, as the counselors prepare this coming week, for the directors as they are all directing for the first time give them wisdom, for health, for faithfulness, as the campers go back to the real world help them to continue in the truth, thankyou for the freedom i have to pick up and leave a job and just spend a summer working in the only way that makes sense to me, bless all the other volunteers too for taking time out of there lives to do Gods work, help us to remember to focus on God.
there are many more things you can pray about but this is all i can think of right now

this week in preparation for camp I am going to spend 2 days in the wilderness alone spending uninterrupted time with God. so pray for safety as I am canoing by myself , and pray that God would work in me and reveal to me what i need to work on.
and continue to pray as we are at camp

chad

part 3: saturday- sunday

sorry i havent had alot of time lately which makes blogging pretty low on the list of things I need to do, but ill try to finish this trip writeup.

well saturday we were woken up by float planes overhead none of them destine for our lake which was a sigh of relieve, i believe i made a comment like "ze germans are coming" when i first heard the planes, dont think anyone else was awake at that moment but i thought it was funny. we got up had breakfast secured our food up in a tree and headed off to go to saddle lake, the lake right beside us. just a quick little paddle and we were at the portage, on the map it looked like it probably wasnt any more than a couple hundred meters but the triangle said . 5km, and it seemed longer than that, we got through that one pretty easy though. i would post more but i dont really remember everything about this day, i think it was raining off and on, we had pretty good fishing, not alot of fish but it was still good. we stopped on shore for a while, me and jeremiah went exploring after we made a fire and let epp tend to it, both of us got a little cut up from our walk through thick bush and scaling a rockside holding onto plants that had thorns, actually i think jeremiah got cut up by that, i just accidentally cut myself with my knife. we had stuffing for lunch/snack yeah thats right i said stuffing, just stovetop though, and it was more of a soup than a stuffing, it was actually quite gross. then we left to go fishing again after "I told the fire some of my secrets" inside joke, we caught some fish jeremiah had what looked like a mid 30s northern pike on the line but it snapped his line, then we were near a waterfall, i cast out my line right beside the bottom of the waterfall, a largemouth bass immediately hits, i reel it in its like 13", might have been two casts later and i bounce my lure off the shore again and another bass hits and i reel it in i go to grab it and somehow it ends up in my feet, the hook pops out of the rod and goes straight into my ankle the fish still flopping around i take the hook out of my ankle and throw it over the side of the boat, i pick up the fish and pose for a picture then measure it, its 17.5" half a inch short of master angler i put it back in the water it zips off i tend to the cut on my ankle its not bleeding too bad but some blood is coming out, then go to fish again, look to my right side my rods not there look to my left side the rods not there either, i say "wheres my rod?" crap its at the bottom of the lake. so i went from such a high point to such a low point, that sucked. we dont do alot more fishing maybe because they feel bad for me but we head back soon. have supper and shoot off some roman candles. make some jiffy pop mmm and hit the bed.






























sunday we wake up eat pop tarts, break camp and head out, we make predictions of how long it will take to get back paul says 7 jeremiah says 6 i say 5 or something like that seem to remeber saying 4 and half but that doesnt make sense time wise in my head. we head out the wind at our side on the first lake which was good news for us because it meant the the middle lake "the ocean" the wind would be at out back. so we breeze through the 1.75km portage paul only takes 1 break. we get to crowduck and the wind is still at our backs so we are going a pretty good clip then right when we get to the widest part, the part that we wanted the wind to co operate with us it turns and is going sideways on us and pretty vicious. we strategically go straigh into the wind and zig zag our way to the other side, waves crashing against the hull. we get through it and then the we are shielded from the wind by the shore. we see 2 bald eagles sitting on a dead tree, we paddle almost right up to shore where the tree is up on a cliff just above us, none of my pictures turned out though mostly because i cant see what im taking a picture of with my camera and i had it zoomed into the sky. we go through the crowduck portage with ease he way there we took the bog but the way back when we could see we took a path where there were logs to stepp on the whole time it was bog. get to big whiteshell the wind is fierce and directly against us which is better than directly beside us but it makes it alot harder to get anywhere we have no shore to protect us and soon the waves almost turn into whitecaps it was a battle well fought and we made it through. we make it across the big lakes safely. get to shore and run to my car(thats what i call the iron man wilderness edition (canoe, portage, run to the car) w epack up and leave but not before my driver side mirror gets ripped off because we had our rope that held the front of the canoe wrapped around my mirror and i threw my car into reverse and i guess the rope got slack and got caught under my tire. I am within 5 minutes with my time prediction.

phew that was alot of typing, i dont know how much of it is coherent but i hope someone still enjoys reading about my adventures.


chad

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

canoe trip june 12-15 Part 2: friday

this really shouldnt be a 4 post topic but im pretty slow at writing blogs because i always have a thousand other things going on so it might be.

Friday morning we got up and had breakfast funny thing is that whenever im camping in the middle of nowhere i am always the first person up, the sun rises and im wide awake, and usually we dont bring a watch or anything so we never know exactly what time it is which is weird in the morning, but i dont think i woke up too early this morning, but i did wake up paul in the process. so we started paddling the rest of the lake 6km which we breeze through during the day and get to our 1.75km portage into side saddle. so we get to the portage, and start the portage, i really cant remember what the weather was like but i think it was just overcast mostly. we do the portage, its pretty flat and well marked so we get through it pretty good taking a few breaks. have i told you how much of a wild beast Paul is, probably not, i wish i had a picture but this man carried the canoe and his pack(guessing that both weight around80-100lb together) all by himself on all of our portages while jeremiah and I took on minimal extra gear like the tent and paddles and fishing rods. so we get to the lake, its absolutely gorgeous we get onto the lake there is a campsite right in front of us but it is used by the lodge on crowduck lake, if they come to the lake which they eventually didnt which was great. so we paddle around and find a campsite, a pretty sweet one if you ask me and we set up camp at a spot where it is possible that no man has ever stepped foot before. dont really do alot the rest of the day, go fishing a bit dont catch alot of fish but have fun anyways. we have fettuccine with a rose sauce and caribou sausage for supper(jeremiahs meal) we then attpemt to make jello which actually turned out pretty good in my opinion, we warmed up some water and then added the jello mix strawberry dakiri and some other flavour that i cant remember and then we put it in a crevice by the water to cool down and int the morning it was jello.










Tuesday, June 17, 2008

canoe trip june 12-15 Part 1: thursday night

I know this isnt a very long post to have 2 parts but I need to go to sleep and I want to put a blog out there.


This past weekend I went on a canoe/ fishing trip to side saddle lake, we left Thursday evening at around 7 pm picked up the canoe(not mine but my friend Paul's) only really got out of the city at 8ish. So it was me, Jeremiah, and Paul, we drove to big whiteshell lake saw about 25 deer on the way as it was dusk we got there at about 10 and got in the lake just as it was getting dark. I had to park the car about .33km away so i ran there and was wearing this so i did get a few weird looks as i was running through a campground
.

so we got out on the lake Big Whiteshell and started canoing, didnt have very much wind which was partly the reason we went at nighttime because the lake is pretty large. we paddled(aprox 7km across and down to the crowduck portage(.75km) which for a while I didnt think we would even make it to because we had no clue exactly where it was but we found it. portage was pretty easy a little steep on the way up but a nice path and right near the end a 40m bog area which wasnt too bad but i was up to my mid shin at times.















so we finished the portage and went on to canoe crowduck, which if you look on a map is a huge lake which actually kinda looks like a swastika the original plan was to paddle the whole thing 13-14km but we decide to call her quits after we found a campsite after we got past the widest part deemed "the ocean" which is the widest part of the lake a part where we had to be right in the middle and couldnt hug the shore so we paddled across "the ocean" and were past it and looked for a camp site but open shore was near impossible to find, the shores were thick forests with no openings for a tent, so we kept paddling and eventually found a little opening near a beaver lodge, i guess the beavers had cleared the land a bit and we then we set up camp. so we paddled 7km on big whiteshell portaged .75km and then paddled 8km on crowduck took about 4 hours because of the lack of knowing where we were going all the time. all of this in the dark with a little rain off and on and lightning in the distance that kept me on the edge of my aluminum canoe seat.















well thats it for tonight

chad

Sunday, June 8, 2008

canoe, 60 hour work week, and a good time fishing

Canoe

well we did it we bought our first canoe, Jeremiah and I. Its a fairly old aluminum canoe, but it is in relatively good shape. it does leak a tiny bit through some of the rivets in one section so we are going to try to fix that. we went out for our first paddle yesterday so we were very excited, I hope we use it a ton because we both love canoing. we got it for a pretty good price $450 so each of us only payed $225 for it. I am a little disappointed in how much it weighs, Jeremiah was the one who went and looked at it and for some reason it felt super light for him, but now that we loaded it and walked around with it a bit it seems heavy to both of us, which inst really that much of a problem but if i want to go on a solo trip it might be very hard. but still I am very excited, because i love canoing. im excited for my trip next weekend leaving on thursday, paddling and portaging in the dark, we are going to side saddle lake so we paddle across big white shell portage to crowduck(.75km) canoe across crowduck and portage to side saddle(1.3km) none of us have done this trip before so i dont know how far we will get before we call it a night and set up camp so we dont get lost. its going to be lots of fun.

60 hour work week

im pretty tired right now I worked 12.5 hours on monday and tuesday, 10 hours on wednesday and thursday, 7 hours on friday, and 8 hours on saturday. this week I'm only working around 45 hours probably but in 4 days, the job is getting better, my body doesnt hate me quite so much any more and I have it at a point where I dont have to think at all to do my job, so my mind can wander to the strangest things, it makes time go so much faster.

Fishing

I went fishing for the first time this year, it was alot of fun, bumped into one of my cousins there and fished for a couple hours caught 8 small saugers and filled a garbage bag full of beer bottles and other assorted garbage from the shore lines, it was disgusting how much people just litter.

chad

Monday, June 2, 2008

13 hour days, no time to blog with any effort

haha well today I worked 13 hours and probably will work 13 hour days the rest of the week except thursday. probably work 10 hours on saturday too. so needless to say I dont think i will blog much. today was a little bit of a jump straight into the fire, because i hadnt worked in two weeks and actually worked myself harder than when i was tree planting. first time ive worked more than a 10 hour day. its good though, except my body hates me right now.

today i found a canoe that I might purchase(jeremiah and I actualy) its reasonably cheap, in fairly good condition(well the guy selling it said so) so jeremiah is going to go look at it tomorrow so i might own a canoe within 24 hours.

im sooo tirred right now but i got to wait for jeremiah to call me back so i have to wait

I had a good weekend, went to hecla camping with my Reimer family for friday and saturday but had a weding that consumed most of saturday but it was good, then came home saturday night driving through thick fog, and went to jeremiahs baptism and went to a bbq at his parents place after, and then to the movie be kind rewind(meh).

so thats my life right now kinda