June Showers

Happy Father’s Day, it though somewhat bittersweet for me as my Dad is in the ICU recovering from multiple surgeries. He is doing well at last report, and for all the updates and the help she has been to Mom through all this my sister Gail is a hero.

I know it has been a long time since I wrote anything, but I have been so busy lately I just have not persuaded myself to write at all. I decided back in March I would need to go back to work, a few different reasons played into this decision… one being the length of the winters here being so long with so little to do while Andrea is working; I do enjoy ice fishing but to get to a decent lake takes about 3/4 a tank of gas each trip, not something my budget would support every day. Second, we have a few dreams we still wanted to check off the list before it was too late, the first being getting our motorcycle licences and buying motorcycles, we have the bikes –

Andrea’s –

Mine –

We will have finished our training courses by the end of the month and will be legal to drive. I will be adding a small windscreen and some saddlebags at some point. 

We finally made it up to camp last Friday evening, we just wanted to make a plan to upgrade the insulation for hunting season and check the lawn mower. I got the mower going fairly easily and Andrea ran it dry cutting some grass. We wanted to go back this weekend to cut the rest of the grass and cut some firewood but we are suffering from our third day of rain so that idea went out the window.

Back to the job, I am sure blessed to have the friends in my life that have taught, mentored and finally acted as references that enabled me to secure the position. For those that do not know, I am now the Health and Safety Officer at Monarch Industries Winkler Foundry. There are a few videos on YouTube for those that would care to see more of what happens in the foundry and what is made there. I have worked there three weeks now and it’s an interesting, challenging environment. The people there are very welcoming and helpful so it has been a very positive experience to this point.

We are of course very happy to be out on the golf course, we are both playing leagues, I have a great partner and we are doing quite well as I am still very limited in the use of my left shoulder, it is coming along nicely though.

Of course the other big thing we have is a six foot 14 year old eating machine, I had to go back to work in order buy groceries for this monster…

At this point I will let Andrea write about her aquarium, it is coming along very nicely…

Well the aquarium is coming along nicely although now that the nicer weather is here, I have been only adding little bits here and there. I am hoping to place a coral order online as the local selection is quite limited.

I have had some fatalities, I no longer have any blue green chromis or cardinals. I am not sure what happened to the chromis but I suspect the cardinals died as a result of the capture method or I have too much flow/lights (I really suspect they were not healthy critters when I got them as they only lasted a 2-3 weeks).

I have lots of new additions, I have a green bubble tip anemone but unfortunately he has decided to live in a cave so we don’t see him much L. I really wanted to have an anemone for my clown fish to host so I purchased a Seabae anemone which my clowns are hosting J I now have a One spot Foxface, Yellow eye kole tang, dwarf flame angel (Geoff’s favorite), lawnmower blenny, a square anthias, 2 Azure damselfish and 2 velvet damselfish which are supposed to get big, mean and lose their awesome colors so they may become fish bait lol. As far as corals, I have a torch, hammer, leather, 2 sps, quite a few polyps/zoas, a green montipora, a sea fan, and some green star polyps. I have a xenia but for some reason he kept getting unattached to the rock and ended up attaching to my tuxedo urchin so I decided, why not J so he travels around on the urchin J There are 3 videos after these pictures...

Foxface and the thing coming out of the sand beside him is a sea fan:

Dwarf Flame Angel

Velvet damselfish

Leather coral

Green monti

one of my SPS

Torch coral

Azure damselfish (blue and orange) and and my yellow eye kole tang

my clown fish and their seabae anenome

hammer coral - he is a little closed up ....

Green Star polyps

Fish, there are fish in MB

Well at least in Andrea's aquarium...she cycled the tank using the ammonia method and then on the first weekend of April decided to add her first fish, she went with blue green chromis

for the first round. She added three small fish on Saturday evening and carefully watched for any tank related issues. After six days of the tank and fish doing well she decided it was time to add a few more. She went with the salt water aquarium standard clown fish

and decided to go with a pair of cardinals as well.

She is currently at seven fish in the 100 gallon display tank. All these fish will grow to about 3" in length when mature.

I know I have not wrote anything for a bit, but honestly even I do not know how to make sitting home on the couch sound exciting. That is all I do for the majority of the time, a quick trip for a few groceries or going for a drive with Andrea has been the excitement for me the last 13 weeks. I started physio last week, finally able to ditch the sling and start moving my shoulder but under some restrictions. Most movement is supposed to be guided by my other hand and I am under a limit of lifting no more than 10 lbs with that arm. The exercises keep me busy for a couple of hours a day with more to come but they are sorely needed to regain function and strength in that shoulder.

I would like to report that the warm weather is making everything feel like spring but we are still suffering negative temps during the day and things will be a while yet before growing again. With the coming weekend being Easter, we are planning to go to camp the one of the nicer days to see how the place weathered the winter and to take some measurements of things we want to work on to start budgeting...going to take the atv's up though as I suspect the lower pasture where we access the property will be very wet.

I have made a very poor home movie of Andrea's aquarium but if you would like to see it please click below...

Andrea has always been a bit of a photography buff, she actually has some fairly high end equipment and I am going to be spoiling her for our anniversary with a macro lens for her Nikon.
Our anniversary is coming up in a couple of weeks along with her birthday (man did I get suckered on that date) so we have been putting aside a little spare cash to go into Winnipeg for her birthday. A bunch of people from the area and from out of province are getting together for a "frag swap". This means essentially a yard sale for aquarium related stuff, I plan on taking the truck just in case...

An aqua view

The last of Andrea's aquarium parts showed up Monday, THREE months after paying for it. I admit CAD Lights builds very nice aquariums, unfortunately they suck at delivering them. Their customer service is as bad as any company I have ever dealt with. The Canadian reps were good to deal with but they could seem to get nothing done from head office in a timely fashion. I wish I could end this on a happier note talking about the company but how when you buy a Christmas present for your wife and the company completely bungles the order and then takes three months to make it right do you feel good about them...anyway moving on.

We have spent most of the week finding the supplies to finish off the custom plumbing job she wanted. We split the return line into 3/4" return directed into the refugium and controlled by a ball valve to ensure that the flow is kept to a trickle. The other branch of the return stayed at the standard size of 11/2" into the main portion of the sump.

Once the setup was dry fit we ran a garden house in and filled the tank and sump with standard water from an outside tap (I had spent some time in the sun getting the ice out of the hose) and ran everything to ensure the modified setup would work. Everything seemed to be exactly as she wanted it so at that point Andrea shut everything down and drained the tank.

The following morning I shop vacuumed the remaining water and grit from the tank and then set the supply hose from our RO/DI (reverse osmosis/de-ionized) water system I had installed to perform the dual feature of giving us both pure drinking water and the special water recommended for supplying a reef aquarium. As this system will supply a maximum of 100 gallons of purified water per 24 hours it was going to take a couple of days to fill this beast. I started it at 07:44 Friday morning and we ran it well into the night Friday. We shut it off planning to be safe if we slept in...yeah right, 06:30 seen us starting the day by flicking on the water flow and getting ready for the days plans. We had some running around to do and Noah and I were scheduled for haircuts (only a slight trim for me thank you), Andrea needed new sneakers for running around at work and so on. We shut off the supply while we were out for a few hours but promptly turned it back on when we returned home.

As Saturday evening dragged on the tank seemed to have doubled in capacity, it was akin to watching paint dry waiting for the final inch to fill and the overflow to start draining water into the sump. Of course the whole time waiting for the tank to fill was not as simple as sitting there watching for Andrea, she had to mix enough of the special salt into it to make the specific gravity read 1.025, we did the calculations and she mixed the salt in, she ran the water heaters to help bring the water up to temp (26*C) and once the salt mix was done she had to add her sand bed. She chose after much debate to go with a deep sand bed in her refugium so she made that 4 inches deep while going with a shallow sand bed in her main tank so that is about 1.5" deep. Her rock had been in place for quite a while waiting for the missing aquarium parts.

About midnight she was content, the proper water levels had been reached, everything was finally running and everything was the way it was supposed to be. That includes water so cloudy you cant see into it, using very fine sand comprised mostly of calcium chloride means there is a bunch of very fine silty stuff in the water column, this will completely settle in the next couple of days and the water will become crystal clear. The tank still has to do whats known as "cycle" which essentially means it has to have an ammonia source to build a colony of nitrifying bacteria that will convert the ammonia (toxic to fish and corals) to nitrite and then build a colony of bacteria that will convert the nitrite (also toxic to fish and corals) to nitrate to prepare the system to process the fish waste once they are introduced to the tank. Once she can start adding fish and corals the system will become a living breathing coral reef, over the years it will grow into a spectacular show piece, however this is not a venture to be undertaken by those without patience.

Aquarium Index

Display Tank - this is a 48" wide, 20" high, 24" deep tank made from 1/2" thick Starfire glass, holding aprox 100 gallons. There is an overflow in the back center that has three holes drilled in it to allow plumbing to move water around.

A - D this is the part of the aquarium known as the sump.

A- This is the refugium, the original sump from CAD Lights did not include this, I bought a piece of glass at a local shop and we installed it to create this section. Allows for additional bio-filtration and allows a place to grow different algae for more bio-filtration and to grow micro organisms to feed the fish and corals.

B - Protein Skimmer - this is a device designed to do what natures waves do, create a foamy, bubbly spot that removes impurities from the water, much like the dirty foam winds pile up on the beach.

C - Filtration Media - this removes excess bits through mechanical media (foam)

D - the lower D is the section of the sump that houses the return pump which pushes 1100 gallons per hour of water from the sump back to the display tank. This water flows out into the tank helping create the current required to emulate a natural reef in tidal waters. The are also two other wave makers installed in the tank, each one capable of circulating 1100 GPH - these are connected to a programmer that enables them to alternate operating times to simulate ocean currents etc.

The upper D is the main return line, the upside down T in white is where the return water comes from the display tank, dividing it into the refugium and main return, the D is on the actual drain hose that provides the bulk of the water to the sump to be filtered and returned to the display tank.

The lights shown hanging above the display tank are full spectrum LED lights that are fully programmable to create a natural sun / moon cycle.

Post Surgery

Well its been a week and a bit since I had my shoulder done. I do not know exactly how many pins were put in, I will find that out when I see the surgeon again on the 20th. I do know he also had to make an opening for one of my bicep tendons to slide as it was all jammed up, I think that may have been more painful than the rotator cuff repair itself. All in all it is starting to feel better but I am a long way from doing much. Noah's March break was this week and I had fun teasing him that I could drive so he could do everything else and we would spend the week ice fishing, in reality though no chance.

Ice Fishing Wrap Up

Well it seems like the last ice fishing trip I will be able to make this year was a blow out success, Andrea and I actually hit the road at 06:15 and were on the ice at Pelican Lake by 08:30. Setup and fishing by 09:00 and were landing perch immediately. We were fishing a flat in eight FOW and the bite was on, poor Andrea had only been out a few times this season so it took her a few minutes to get set-up and fishing. I landed four perch before she had a line in the water but she did not take long to get going.

My flip shelter once again proved it worth, with wind chills in the -33 Degree range we ran our little buddy heater and were quite comfortable fishing with out our coats on. Although it is tight in the little flip with two people it is so much easier to setup and be fishing in minutes rather than trying to setup a tent in 30 MPH wind.

The day was wonderful, the fishing was fantastic, the sun shining bright and my wife to keep me company, hard to beat that any time of year.

Pelican Lake seems to be an interesting lake we will get to know well in the future, only a 30 minute drive from our camp, we look forward to making the place capable of being warm and comfortable in the winter so we can go spend weekends there and fish both Rock and Pelican Lakes year around. Both lakes have a plentiful supply of Perch, Walleye and Northern Pike so they will supply our reasons for "getting away" to camp when there is no hunting season to draw us up there. Our idea to purchase this property is looking better and better...

Back to the fish story, we caught fish steadily until about 12:30 when the bite changed like someone threw a blanket over the fish, I then began just opening tackle bins and proceeding to try random jigs, hard baits, tails colours etc until I found what they wanted...they wanted a tiny bright pink fish fry bodies on small bright pink jig heads...the bite was on, over the next hour I caught another 17 perch...this was quite a switch from the morning bite, I was most successful with buckshot lures in a rainbow pattern as well as a Lindy Rattlin' Flyer Spoon in the same while Andrea was using a Rattling Flyer Spoon Perch that I had done so well with last Monday and a variety of other larger jigs, lots of stuff worked well in the morning as long as it was tipped with perch eyes, after the bite switched I think we may have caught two on setups tipped with eyes, everything else was on plastics in the afternoon. Knowing we were getting ready to head home I decided to call Dad and Mom for a quick chat before we packed up, we were all chatting on speakerphone on our end and I missed a couple of bites while talking to Dad, Mom got on the phone and bang a heavy hit, Andrea took the phone while I landed the largest perch of the day. It had tangled my two lines so bad I just cut the lines, a nice fat prize to end the year. Overall we must of landed 100 + perch for the day....

We filled a large grocery bag with perch for a couple of meals, about 20 - we were actually allowed 25 each under the limit but that just seemed excessive to me. 20 perch the size we kept will actually feed the three of us two fish dinners and make a few fish patties for Andrea's lunches.

Noah had a friend over last night and I dragged the two of them out this morning to help me unload the truck...the truck has been full of ice fishing gear all winter, but it is now all in the house, garage or storage as it is done...

Off to Winnipeg in the morning, when I get home my arm will be immobilized for the next six weeks (so the Dr says LOL) but in six weeks it will be time to be getting ready for GOLF, open water fishing and working on the camp...yeah SPRING!!!

Time is Flying

When I looked and seen that I had not posted anything in over a week I was shocked, I guess I have been busier than I realized. Mostly fishing except the weekends, we were planning to go to Pelican Lake last weekend but that never worked out.

Backing up a little in time: I mentioned in my last post I had gotten a Frabil ultra light combo in exchange for the Abu Garcia that broke. One fish, a 10" crappie told me that combo was junk, I took it back that afternoon. The young lady working the customer service desk at Canadian Tire said wow they should not do that,should they when I showed her how the drag jumped 1/2  a turn a pop..I ended up giving up on that and taking a Fenwick Elite Tech Ultralight rod and mounting an Ugly Ice reel I had and going with that. Over 20 fish later and I am thoroughly impressed with the Fenwick...

I have been fishing a few times now in the last week, a couple of days I went out for the afternoon and managed to get one or two crappie. Thursday was a harsh day weather wise so I skipped fishing and played around the house.

Friday I hooked up with Josh and we fished Minnie again, I got one 11" crappie and he got two real little ones, he really wanted to get a third, as he said another one the size of the first two and he would catch up to me..(they really were not that bad.)

Noah had no school Monday so I dragged him to Pelican Lake for the day. We were actually set up and fishing by 10 AM (much later than I wanted but such is life) By 1030 I had iced four Perch and then the bite slowed down, it took a good part of that time to figure out what they were going to bite, none of my traditional perch stuff worked but I got them biting on this http://www.lindyfishingtackle.com/productdetail.aspx?id=rattlnflyerspoon.

Once the bite slowed down I figured it was time to pull out one of my friend Doug's tricks and popped out a fresh perch eye and hooked that up to a jig from my multi pack that is similar to this
http://www.lindyfishingtackle.com/productdetail.aspx?id=techniglogenzworm

I ended the day with about 20 perch, Noah grudgingly actually caught two, the first came after I slipped a perch eye on his jig he was dead sticking and got nailed...the second came after I went to remove the ice from the hole he was fishing and made the jig move, the flaskher showed fish immediately so I told him to grab the rod and he lifted a bit and hammered another one about 11". That was the extent of his interest, unfortunate as he has the potential to be a great fisherman. I caught a few more over the afternoon and we brought home a nice feed.

Perhaps though the most satisfying part of the day was meeting a retired farmer who was very new to ice fishing, he had an auger with no extension so he drilled as deep as he could then I finished his holes with mine. He had a hummingbird flasher that he had no idea how to setup so I showed him how to set that up. He was not catching anything so I gave him a couple of perch eyes and he had a jig similar to the one I was using, by the time I left he had caught three and was planning on more...kind of neat.

broken rod and more

As I mentioned before, Andrea and I gave each other new Abu Garcia ultra light combos for Christmas. We had very little chance to use them (Andrea less so than me) but we both caught perch on them last weekend and were very happy with how they preformed. I continued to use mine this week catching two more crappie on it but missing the hook set on several others. I blamed this on my own over reaction rather than the rod, however I did not like the size of the guides when fishing cold weather. The guides are very small and ice up very bad.

I fished again Wednesday early through the afternoon and caught one crappie, the same Thursday, I was on the ice early and caught one crappie and then my flasher died. I had been questioning how good the charger was and now I found out, I also found out it dies at about 11.6V. So my trip Thursday was over by 1030, no point in trying to catch crappie that are disinterested with no flasher to even indicate where they or your jig is in the water column. I had a spare battery maintainer / trickle charger so I hooked that up and left it sit. Surprisingly it took almost 12 hours to indicate fully charged, but at least everything seemed to be working well.

Friday seen another bitterly cold day so I decided to go out later, the wind had been blowing about 40 MPH overnight but was supposed to die down midday. I hit the ice about 1230 and fished a couple of different areas I wanted to check out...more of the same I could get on fish but not coax a bite, these new areas were also showing less fish than what I had found in other areas.

Once the wind died and the sun was beating on my black shelter it was quite pleasant, I was able to fish in my fleece until the sun went behind the trees. Once the sun was not providing the same level of heat my rod started to ice up quite badly and while trying to clean some of the ice out of the tip guide I snapped it off. I was very disappointed that it was that fragile..

Saturday seen me off to Canadian Tire where I had bought the rods, they were supposed to be warranted for one year. No problem, they told me to go get a new one, however they had no more so I ended up with a frabill ultralight combo, it was the same price but I am hesitant to think I will like it as much...

http://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/frabil-ice-fishing-rod-reel-combo-0785516p.html#.UvfXivldW9Q

I already had this combo in medium for walleye and it is acceptable but not top notch, I already find the reel is not as nice as the Abu Garcia. However if it works as intended I will be ok with it. I do think I will start buying more stuff from the US and have it shipped to the parcel depot right across the border, $2.00 a parcel is all she charges and the price difference can be 1/3 of the cost of buying here...the down side is lack of warranty like Canadian Tire honours.

We have had wind chill warnings all weekend and looks like more of the same Monday so I will be buried in my shelter with the heater going trying this new rod...

Tuesday will see me doing something different, I have been asked to attend a testing phase for a job as an administrative assistant at the Morden Agriculture Research facility...God only knows how that will turn out, I expect that some of the others attending will be very experienced as well.