A Sad Tale of 5 Motors and 3 Boats
or, Why Shepherds Need Whiskey (the Art of Small Motor Repair, Part II)

cast of characters:
Heidi and Kathryn, intrepid Arctic researchers
The Golder Fish Dudes, Tim and Paul (lamented in photo and song in a previous entry)
John and Richard - Golder bathymetry engineer and his erstwhile Inuit assistant
Whizzy and Zingy - 15 HP 4-stroke motors
Zippy - 4 HP 2-stroke motor
Pingo and Tussock - 15 HP 2-stroke motors
2 leaky red boats
1 leaky grey boat

key information:
- 2-stroke motors take gas mixed with oil, 4-stroke use straight gas
- inflatable boats of the type we're using get their structure and integrity from floor boards which are held in place by rails that run along each side

Day 5 - Heidi and Kathryn start using Whizzy on one of the Leaky Red Boats. All appears to go smoothly.

Day 7 - We take the second Red Boat out of its box and help Tim and Paul inflate and set it up with Zingy. Unfortunately, the boat comes with only one set of rails so Zingy is handicapped from the beginning. Nonetheless, all appears to go smoothly (leaking like a sieve aside)

Day 10 - Whizzy is damaged in sling between two lakes. Ingenious field repair involving pro-wrap and sport tape (see previous entry) enables us to sample a couple of sites that morning, then we switch to Zippy. Heart of champions, has Zippy, but only 4 - count 'em, 4 - horses; not so speedy.

Day 10 (evening) - we test Pingo and Tussock on our Leaky Red Boat. Tussock turns out to have the run/kill switch broken off (in the run position) - this poses some problems. Ingenious repair job of Whizzy Part II, involving washing machine part and electrical tape (thanks, Paul and Ben!).

John arrives to conduct bathymetry surveys on lakes around here, and is given priority boat. H & K fetch Leaky Grey Boat from bottom end of Windy Lake, whence it has blown and been left abandoned. So now we have Tim and Paul with Zingy (straight gas) on a Leaky Red Boat, John and Richard with Whizzy (straight gas) on the other LRB, and Heidi and Kathryn with Pingo (mixed gas) on the LGB. Imagine, if you will, these three boats jetting back and forth among 15 lakes, with jerry cans and fuel tanks intersecting in the evenings as we each try to get the right fuel in the right tank, and back out to the right boat each day.

Meanwhile, as we zoom about on Golder sampling forays, we are cunningly transporting the gear for Heidi's PhD project, since we are going to the same lakes in helicopters that we will later be visiting on foot. If, for example, we are sampling Doris Lake and Roberts Lake for water quality. Well, we're flying there anyway, so we will take the benthic sampling equipment and one jerry can to Roberts Lake, and some fishing and camping gear to Doris Lake... (planning ahead for which boat will end up where at the end of the Golder work, to get the correct jerry can at each distribution node).

Do you remember that logic puzzle about the shepherd, a sheep, a wolf, one boat, and needing to cross the river?

Day 11. We discover that LGB has no rails for structural integrity - search transects and enquiries in camp reveal that these rails were, in fact, burned during a big garbage purge the previous winter. Yes, burned. Yes, they were aluminum rails. Well, not to be deterred by minor setbacks! We pull a large rusty screw out of LGB's bottom, spend a morning diligently applying 8 patches, gamely mount Pingo, and ship 'er off to Doris Lake to start fishin'. (The shepherd now has 5 sheep distributed on 2 lakes, but still only 1 boat).

Day 12 (morning): We find several suspicously familiar-looking pieces of rubber boat patch washed up on shore next to where we've moored the LGB. It becomes the VLGB (Very Leaky Grey Boat). Not to be deterred by minor setbacks, we head out.

Imagine, if you will, an inflatable rubber boat, that has no rails to hold its floorboards in place. Imagine these floor boards buckling and bouncing as the boat inchworms across the lake. Imagine the great gushes of water flowing in as the rest of the patches wash off. Picture Kathryn, braced against the side of the boat, pushing down with her legs trying to hold the floorboards in place to lend some stability. Picture Heidi, steering with one hand, navigating using the GPS with the other, and bailing the boat with a third (I don't know how she does it, either!). The boat can't get on plane - the motor leg can't get in the water properly - every 50 feet or so, the motor stalls and we all lurch forward (more great gushes of water come rushing over the bow).

"It's like driving an accordion with a sewing machine," Heidi says.

Day 12 (afternoon): We switch Pingo for Zippy. Zippy, big-hearted, but with only 4 - count 'em, 4 - horses, but a longer motor leg.

"It's like driving an accordion with a hand mixer," Kathryn says.

We put Pingo back on (switching jerry cans and fuel tanks appropriately). And, we create a new measurement for time and space. Although the distance we travel each day is, from a cartographic point of view, not far, in terms of logistical nightmares, wrenchingly difficult decisions made, collapse narrowly averted by clawing your way out by the emotional fingernails, and insurmountable obstacles overcome by sheer ingenuity, makes them equivalent to Lewis and Clark Expedition Days.

Day 27 (Day 67, LAC): Richard and John have their LRB, with Whizzy, out in the middle of Patch Lake. To liven the day, they check the oil... Over the radio, Kathryn and Heidi hear, "Yes. Um. Windy Camp. We need a new motor, and 12 long nails."

We look at each other with bemusement. "They're in an inflatable boat."

A new dipstick for Whizzy is ordered (since Patch Lake is about 20 m deep, and, who knew? dipsticks sink when dropped in lakes). LRB #1 switches Whizzy (straight gas) for Tussock (mixed gas). Unfortunately, jerry cans and fuel tanks are not switched, thus making them useless for Whizzy and Zingy in the future. Tussock still has the run/kill switch busted - posing some problems.

Day 39 (Day 90 LAC): Tim and Paul, out of the goodness of their hearts, switch boats with us. Boy, does Zingy zoom in that LRB! Even with her 2-rails-only handicap, it's like going Mach 8...

Day 40: Carey, one of the helicopter engineers in camp, makes new rails for the VLGB (yay, Carey!) out of left-over floor boards from the (retired) other VLGB (burned last winter). Yes, burned. Yes, it was a rubber boat. With these make-shift rails, theVLGB is down-graded to a LGB, and we can get on plane - no more motor stalling! Yippee!

Day 45 (Day 134 LAC): Zingy, sadly, is injured in a lake-to-lake sling: the gear shift is broken. Ingenious Field Repair #2, involving a hollowed-out willow branch, and duct tape. All is well.

Fish Dudes leave (very sad). Zingy, on LRB #2 and with her straight-gas jerry can and fuel tank, goes to Glenn Lake. Pingo, on VLGB and with mixed gas, heads to Roberts Lake. Tussock, on LRB #1, with mixed gas in the formerly straight gas tanks, is busy conducting bathymetric maps of Windy Lake. Whizzy sits in Windy Camp, awaiting union with her new dipstick (which has arrived), and perhaps a new straight gas tank. Zippy, almost empty of mixed gas, sits on shore at Doris Lake, sadly disconnected from a boat. We spend a few days sampling Glenn.

The shepherd now has 8 sheep distributed on 5 lakes, 2 of them with eating disorders, 1 with an injured leg, 2 wolves, and several leaky boats.

Day 47 (Day 236 LAC): We cheerfully arrive for a day of sampling at Roberts Lake, after a lovely trek across the technicolour-fall-leaves-covered tundra. We discover that Pingo and the LGB have broken free from their mooring... and blown across the lake... with the willows we'd tied them to still attached...

Well, once reunited with the boat, we optimistically revved her up - to discover that she had been damaged in her last sling, has a missing carburetor cap, and is leaking too badly to use.

"Heidi," I said, as she tried to build a new carburetor cap out of (you guessed it, pro-wrap and duct tape), and I was trying to remember the various locations of (working) motors, (relatively non-leaky) boats, jerry cans and fuel tanks with which type of fuel, and how to bring the correct combination together at Roberts Lake with a minimum of hiking and helicopter time, "Heidi," I said, "even Hercules only had 12 trials. And Hercules was a demi-god."

PS We don't know what those 12 long nails were for, either.

Day 46: In which Heidi and Kathryn hit the wall

The exhaustion wall, that is. A memorable moment when we both stalled half-way into the boat: beached on the inflated sides, with no juice left to pull ourselves in the rest of the way.

"Heidi?"

"Yes?"

"I am not self-propelled today."

This exhausted state may have been exasperated by today's foolish attempt to kick the cookie habit...

We have spent the past few days gathering lakeshore invertebrates. These are all veeeeery wee creatures and for contaminant analyses, Heidi needs at least 10 g of each species.

Now, most people collect these critters by kicking up the bottom, and then scooping everything up into a net. Using this technique it would, as you can imagine, take a very long time to gather the required weight. Well! We have discovered that it is much more efficient to use an electrofisher. Yes, an electrofisher. As Heidi says, "this has never before been done in the history of the world".

As Kathryn says, "Ha ha! Your advanced nervous system is your downfall! Mwa-ha-ha!". Okay, yeah; we did mention it's day 46, right?

We are mostly collecting 3 different bugs: Gammarus and Mysis, 2 types of freshwater shrimps, and Star Trek-esque marine isopod that has invaded these lake systems. Mysids are tiny, see-through shrimp (see photo) that come up in great clouds as we electroshock. Hence, our latest field song - to the tune of My Girl:

I've got crustaceans, on a cloudy day
When it's cold outside, I've got Mysidacea*

I guess you'd say,
what can make me feel this way?
Mysids... mysids... mysids
talking 'bout, mysids (mysids mysids ooooh)

I've got sooooo many shrimp, the trout envy me
I've got more invertebrates, than the charr out in the sea...

* for entomologists and other pedants: yes, we know that isn't the real family name; give us some poetic licence, here!

Tomorrow, we head out again to our peaceful weather haven, until after the Labour Day weekend. The weather is changing, with a cold north wind chilling us even with the sunny days, and although it still never gets truly dark, we have deep dusk from about 10 o'clock onwards: in fact, we're losing 9 or 10 minutes of light at each end of the day, now. So, we are very pleased that the Windy Camp site super, Glen, put in a new stove out at Doris Lake for us, and put up a tarp to help keep out most of the wind and rain from the haven. The stove is currently stocked with Jet B airplane fuel so it burns like a hot damn; we'll be toasty, indoors anyway.

The bearberry have become a bright red, the blueberry bushes are a deep burgundy, and the willows coat the tundra with gold and amber. The bog cranberries will be ripe soon - morning frosts these days - and the geese are starting to head south in great, honking, staggering flocks. The camp siksik are frantically pulling pink insulation out of the buildings and packing up their burrows to accommodate their increasingly-obese bodies for the winter. We're excited to be back out alone to watch the seasons change and gather the last of the year's blueberries, sorrel, and (hopefully!) fishes for the study. Hope you're all warm and happy heading into fall, and as content to be where you are, as we are to be here.

Day 41: We continue to ponder the anchor dilemma and lament the loss of Tim and Paul

Well, today was one of those days when you periodically look at the sky and shake your head. We got a lot done so it was very productive, but a bit trying at times. We think the departure of Tim and Paul this morning threw us off of our game. Just as the helicopter was landing to pick us up, I realized we had forgotten the oxygen probe and went galloping off to the enviro-tent to retrieve it (while wearing waders). Our motor, zingy, was



Paul happy to see a trout and Tim doing a headstand on the tallest outcrop around

not so happy today and I regained my sailor mouth on a few occasions attempting to start her and lock the tilt. Grrr. I fell in the lake at about 10 this morning while attempting to get the cargo net around the boat to sling it to the next lake. There is this particular mixture of silt and boulder that sucks you in up to your ankles. You then trip because you can’t SEE the boulders while the silt is all stirred up. Long story short: Heidi is wet and clammy for the rest of the day. This happened to Kathryn about 3 days ago. Nothing like wet bum all day.

On the topic of anchors and tundra imponderables: how is it possible to have an anchor so heavy that you cannot lift it into the boat yet not heavy enough to keep you in one spot? We have now attached a large bag of rocks to our super-hooker (NOT SO HOOKY)!

Lamenting the loss of Tim and Paul. Tim and Paul from Golder have been here for a month and left today. They caught fish for us, helped us process samples late into the night, entertained us, laughed at our geeky jokes, brought us grapefruit, gas, and other supplies to the weatherhaven, picked up our samples, took our safety calls every evening….in short, Tim and Paul are fantabulous. And today they left. Sigh. We decided to write a song in their honour.

Ahem.

(To the tune of Hey Jude – Beatles)

Fish dudes
Where have you gone?
You’ve made us sad today
By leaving Windy camp
Remember, when you brought us all of those charr
And we stayed up la-ate, processing samples
Da na na na na na na na na na YEAH!
Da na na na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na
Fish dudes
Da na na na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na
We thank you
Da na na na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na
Fish dudes
Da na na na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na
We miss you

Ah, Tim and Paul, we hope that you are drinking beer for us as we write this. Tim, you also had other instructions. You can multi-task with beer if you like. And Paul, if you can pull it off, give ‘er. For us, because we can’t.

Heidi is lying face down on the tundra because of:

a) a particularly tasty blueberry patch

b) a particularly devilish tundra tussock

c) sheer exhaustion

d) all of the above

Anchors and Such Useful Devices : In which Kathryn and Heidi discover that if you laugh hard enough, you stay warm

When we go water sampling, we have a number of bottles to fill with water taken from different depths, at a specific location on the lake. This naturally involves the need for a good anchor. I believe past entries have alluded to our issues on this front.... well, the other day, we achieved new heights in our ongoing drama of anchors.

There is another fisheries crew here right now doing some baseline surveys for the EIA, and they're sampling some of the same lakes as us. Tim and Paul have been a fantastic help over the last weeks, catching fish, helping us process them, bringing us grapefruit out at our Doris Lake haven... Well a couple of days ago, they set up a Fyke net in one of our study lakes. The tarp and mallet were left neatly folded on shore. The rope was very efficiently, and unfortunately, rolled up and stored in the boat - their boat. So when we went to take down the net (in which we had caught about 8,000 ninespined stickleback; okay, so it was only 552 but Tim and I had to measure each little 2" one of them), well, no rope to bundle it back together with.

No worries, we would just poach some rope from our anchor line. Seemed like a great idea.

Until we got onto our next sample lake the next day and I realised we had forgotten to put extra sideline in the boat.

Let me digress for a moment, to explain the cantankerous nature of sideline. This is thin nylon cord used for most fisheries stuff. I've decided the critical non-tangling lenght for sideline is 2 inches. It sees itself and gets into knots. Tight knots. That you cannot undo with your bone-chilled fingers, in the rain, while trying to get your nets in and out. Oh yeah; sideline will also tangle around anythign and everything within a 10 m radius.

Anyway. So we are doing our usual cruising around in circles trying to find our waypoint (yes, I know there are about 1000 satellites up here; somehow, our GPS still never works properly).

"Heidi," quoth I, "how deep is this lake?"
"Oh, about 15 m."

Ah.

"Let's take stock. We have a 15 m deep lake. We currently have a 7 m anchor line. We have no spare rope. We cannot find our waypoint. In other news, our GPS batteries are dying."

What we did have, fortunately, was a secchi disk. This is a black-and-white disk used to measure visibility in the lakes.

Meanwhile, Heidi was excavating for the spare batteries in the bottom of her bag. She found 3 pairs of spare gloves, some scarves, spare pens, emergency Clif bar, trail mix from 2 months ago... and eventually, the batteries. Which prompted my next rant. Why is everything always on the bottom of a bag? Is there, in fact, no top to a bag? Do bags consist entirely of bottom???

"Heidi," I said, when we finally found our waypoint, as I prepared to toss overboard our anchore, tied to the secchi disk, whose rope was spliced to the anchor rope, "you realise that if this fails, we will lose our anchor, our secchi, and our position?"

Did I mention that it was blowing a gale out of the north and that all of the other crews had already been pulled and gone back to camp, because the "Irish mist" was so thick and low that the chopper pilots were worried they couldn't fly?

We found ourselves blowing clear across the lake and every now and then, I'd pull in the anchor, we'd fire up the motor and teh GPS, and try to find our waypoint again for long enough to take another water grab to fill a few bottles.

About the 4th or 5th time we were zooming back across teh lake, having blown 200m off our position in 10 minutes, I turned to Heidi.

"Heidi," I said. "I didn't pull the anchor in that time."

We looked behind us, to see our anchor - and secchi disk - surfing cheerfully along the surface behind us.

Heidi’s first night of reflection

It is day 9 of our little sojourn on the tundra and this is the first night that we are not up until stupid o’clock processing fish or painstakingly plucking mysid shrimp from small trays. We only have 2 days left out here and then it’s back to the hustle and bustle of camp to do our water sampling. This makes me sad; it is beautiful and peaceful in our little camp. We are staying in a small weather haven on the north end of Doris Lake. Doris haven is slightly decrepit: the seams of the tent tarp are ripping out and where the poles touch the tarp we have mini skylights. A few repairs with enviro-matting, vapour barrier, and tuck tape have done wonders. It certainly helps that the weather has been absolutely unbelievable. In my time here in 2004 and 2005 (approx 8 weeks in total) I experienced 5-7 days of nice weather (spread out over those 8 weeks). This summer, the weather thus far has been fantastic. Clear, sunny, never-ending skies and 20 degrees make for great working days, especially when the sun sets at midnight and rises again at 12:30.

Our camp is nestled at the bottom of the Doris mesa, a flat-topped red-tinted mountain with many clefts and ridges. On clear nights, the sun sets behind the mesa and the view is ethereal. A few nights ago, we got a view of the ocean with all the islands and mesas just before twilight, when everything becomes very calm and quiet. We still have plans to climb the mesa to watch the sunset over the bay but we’re usually processing samples. Hopefully we’ll make it up before the end of the summer.

Sometimes I feel completely overwhelmed by how privileged I am to be here. Our life here is very simple. Gather water, filter water, eat, do dishes, work, check-in with main camp every night, attempt to plan the next day. The sampling has gone slightly slower than I had hoped, but I don’t have a ton of experience collecting benthic invertebrate samples and it takes a LONG TIME to collect 10 g of invertebrates in Arctic lakes. Kathryn bought a book on Arctic plants in the Yellowknife airport and I am slowly learning some of them. The red bearberries and blueberries are ripe right now so sometimes when we are walking through the hummocks we will suddenly collapse to our knees and forage for a few minutes in a particularly good patch. There are also crowberries and lingonberries, but apparently the lingonberries aren’t fully ripe until after the first frost. We also tried eating sorrel the other day. It is packed with vitamin C and, as advertised, tastes like rhubarb! Botany is all about the edibles (you may recall our earlier lichen experiments)! The small plants and animals are always full of surprises, and I will be busy for the foreseeable future trying to sort out the ground-cover plants and keeping the sik-sik from stealing all of our tent insulation.

The landscape here reminds me a bit of the prairies. The sky is limitless; you can almost tell the earth is round when you look at the horizon. The ridges, bedrock outcrops, and mesas are dramatic and imposing but the tussocks and vegetation are subtle in the extreme. Kathryn remarked that everything here feels young, and I agree with her. It feels raw, edgy, and pure. The hot concrete of the city in summer feels a million miles away. This is not to say that we would not enjoy a margarita on a patio right now!
It was strange the other day, though. Lots of time one has to endure field work. It’s often snowing, rainy, cold, excruciatingly windy, or a combination. The other day we were driving to the outflow of the lake and I thought, “What would I like to be doing right now?” I wasn’t tired, so I didn’t want to be sleeping. I wasn’t hungry (this is a miracle). I wasn’t too hot or too cold. I came to the conclusion that where I wanted to be was here, exploring a part of this world that few people get to see and discovering that these lakes have caddisflies, mysids, and tadpole shrimp, not to mention emerald shiners (HELLOOO range extension).

The wind blows through my hair that is currently long enough to be in my eyes and not long enough to be in a ponytail. I tromp around camp in my too-big Columbia pants (they were out of women’s sizes), a dirt-streaked white sun shirt, a ball cap from the Fishin’ Hole, and my rubber boots. There are black flies crawling up under my sunglasses and bouncing off my eyeballs and I am glad to be grounded. Here.

- Heidi

How to Poo on the Tundra

Step 1: Acquire permit. No, really! Our research permit details specific requirements for latrine construction.

Step 2: Scout appropriately wind-swept tundra location. ( windy is good: keeps the bugs away). Preferably, choose a previously-disturbed site. Since most of this area has been drilled at one point or another as part of the explorations, finding disturbed sites is not hard. Actually, most of our "yard" at the Doris Lake weather haven is disturbed.

Step 3: Assemble implements. Trowel, ziplocs... you get the idea.

Step 4: Dig hole.

Step 5: Dig new hole. Our attempts to dig a multi-use latrine were foiled by permafrost. I dug a lovely 2' deep pit; by early the next morning, it had filled with water. Stupid tundra bog.

Tundra wagons in action!


We are now back in Windy Camp after 2 weeks on our own in our peaceful Doris Lake weather haven, about a 3 hour hike from here. Putting our tundra wagons into action was an adventure!

First foray with the wagons: we made it as far as the machine shop at the edge of camp, where we stopped to do some upgrades and adjustments...

Then we were off to the races! Here you can see Heidi at the edge of camp, and heading for the hills.