25th September – Saskatoon, SK – Raven Camp, SK

Up early (and maybe feeling just a little worse for wear), we headed off to the airport to catch our flight to Points North via Price Albert. The sun was rising just as we were taking off from Saskatoon, with the landscape from the air starting to change to the prairies even within the 25 minutes it took to get to our first stop, Prince Albert..

We hopped off to plane for 10 minutes to grab some cargo and a couple of passengers and the pilot (the man seems to do everything) took our photo. As you can see the plane (apart from being another prop… sigh) is quite small. It’s quite strange to be able to see out the pilots window, particularly when coming in to land and they are trying to line up the run way. A quick stop and we were off to Points North, about a 90 minute flight. The sun disappeared and we couldn’t see much at all including the run way until we were almost on top of it. Brendo met us at the airport and we caught up with him and the boys looked at core and talked work for a while. Brendo drove us out to Raven Camp (about 30 mins – although we had to head back half way there and refuel as the petrol light came on). At this point it was around 5 degrees. We stopped at Kewen Lake at Dan’s request to reminisce about the many fish he caught there.

We got Dave the cook to hold some lunch for us and then spent the best part of the afternoon ‘pimping’ out The Love Shack (our tent). We’re actually quite lucky that we have a tent all to ourselves. Pity its near the generator which sounds a little like a truck being parked outside the tent on idle.. Oh, did we mention that it also has no insulation. We’ve made ourselves quite comfortable. Our tent is quite warm with the diesel driven heater in it (we did have to open a window in the tent for fear of being fumed out as we are the only people without a carbon monoxide monitor). Home sweet home for another month or so!

Dan decided to give his new fly rod a workout in the river and promptly lost the end of his new rod. He gave the Mark Hamill mouse fly a go and got a surface strike and wet and that was about all he had to show for the night.