The Adventures of Dan and Tan: 12th August, Raven, SK

A really busy morning! Today is the sample shipment day. The ore material is classified as a dangerous good so once they are loaded the truck has to drive ten hours to Saskatoon to the lab. It is important to get all the paperwork right and ensure safe delivery of our samples. Samples are placed into pails (white buckets) and typically we send 20 – 40 off a week. Today we sent off 98!! A Raven record, thanks to our West Bear sampling. Hopefully we get some good results. The line cutters , Larry, Thomas and Norman, come back again for the afternoon and got stuck into it. Chainsaws are a lot quicker than the trusty axe.

We heard about a month ago that the MacKenzie River was the place for walleye. Derek, Jessica (the baker) and myself hooked up with Brendan at Points and then traveled another 30km the other side. We knew where is was because we had a look in Google Earth. We got there to see a nice sandy beach. Derek caught a nice pike within minutes. I followed suit with another. A kingfisher was darting around us and wasn’t too happy by our presence. From the bridge with my new polaroids I watched a pike strike Derek’s lure. Watching this was inspirational to catch more. Derek ended up walking out a long way along the shallow levee bank and fish in deep water and nailed one more great pike. Brendo, Jess and I went the other side and fished in the shallow water. I ended up wading out past the height of my gumboots and the other two decided to do the same.

One more pike and this one decided that my repair job from that afternoon was insubstantial. It was weird fighting a fish with only the bottom half of the rod doing the work.

The sunset was great, lighting up the road cutting and surrounding trees. The esker, long sinuous ribbons of sand had about 8m of relief on the edge of the lake / river. That night it belted down with rain on the tent roof. Pity as it was supposed to be the night of an awesome meteorite shower.