camp news

Every spring when it's time to put the docks in, it seems like we need a small army of friends and family to help with the "feat". This year, along with Dave, we had help from Dale and Val as well (check the spring blogs!!!) and every year, after the "feat" has been completed, Ed says the same thing "We should look into aluminium docks"

Now, there's no doubt that aluminium docks are nice, they are light weight and easy to handle, they are certainly "lake friendly", they last nearly forever.... but they can be expensive. As the summer has progressed, though, Ed has talked more and more about them, and finally went on a "fact finding" about them. Well, turns out, that if you order them at the right time (ie: the end of summer) you can sometimes find a deal.... and so he did. This past week, the old, heavy wooden docks have been replaced with these nice new aluminium ones!!!!

Course, that meant getting rid of the old docks, and hopefully, for the last time, it took a small army of men to do so. Ed took his chainsaw and cut the wooden docks into manageable pieces, and Dave, Bill and John, wrestled them up onto the shore and then to Bill's trailer to be hauled away!!! Oh, and maybe one of the best things about the new docks... NO dock spiders!!!! Those spiders are as big as house cats!!! and like the dark spots under the wooden decks, but the new ones are open, light and airy and we are told, the dock spiders don't like them as their homes.... fine with us!!!!

Now, what's with the boat. Well, it has it's own story!!! This boat is actually an old boat... a 1966 model and it used to belong to Ed's Uncle Phil. Back in the day, Phil and his family had a camp on Wilson, and Ed can remember running their boat across the lake to visit with his cousins, Deb and Cindy, and vis a versa...... he has a lot of wonderful memories of growing up on the lake. Uncle Phil sold his camp in the early 80's because his family was no longer using it, and when the camp sold, the boat was pulled from the water and parked in a garage.


I'm not exactly sure how Ed found out it was for sale, but either way, Ed decided it would be fun to have and bought it from his uncle. This boat has only ever been on Wilson Lake, aside from sitting in the garage, and it didn't take too much "tinkering" to get her running again. "We" aren't exactly sure what we will do with this old boat, it runs pretty well, and its fun to have a boat to take us around the lake, and we don't need any sort of "speed" thing, so for a while anyways, we'll hang onto it and use it. Sometimes its fun to have something older to play with and Ed thinks it's pretty neat that the boat has retunred to it's "home".