Nov 4 - not a sign

Nothing. In the morning we sat on one of the ridges behind the cottage; in the afternoon on the ridge along the old logging road across the lake. Nothing. Nothing, that is, until some guys came along the road towing a tractor and then with it raining, we gave up for the day. Anything that might have been in the area was long gone.

Jim called in the evening to say that they'd gotten one. His group of four had seen nothing until yesterday. One of their number saw six yesterday but only one -- all it takes is one -- that was a reasonable shot. He's hunting in the Arnstein area. I told him that there was nothing behind us and he suggested that we go down the lake and hunt by Portage Lake, a place where he guides. We decided to give that a go this morning, but it's snowing and raining right now and we have no desire for a long, cold, wet boat ride. There's a limit to the amount of discomfort that we'll endure.

From my look at the Doppler, it will be precipitating for a while. Of course I had to go out and scrape the buildup off the dish to even see that. We may go nowhere today. If we don't go today, we certainly won't go tomorrow since the day is supposed to start off at -7C. Right now it is 0C / 32F. Six days from now it will be 80F ... because we'll be in Florida. Ah yes, I'm counting the days.

We had catfish and bass for dinner last night along with Sandy's famous zucchini & cherry tomato & olive stir-fry. I'm chuckling as I write this because George's blog always refers to Geri's famous something-or-other :). After all, if we write it in the blog, then the Google web crawlers pick it up, it's famous, right ?

Oh -- I can see that our signal is iffy again. The lights go out on the modem and then come back on ... signal strength has dropped to 31, service is "degraded" according to the system status page ... aka, fuggedaboudit. Perhaps I'll go scrape the dish again.

... back from scraping, internet is back. I think that if we stayed up here winter-long I'd install a low wattage heater cable across the back of the dish that I could turn on at will. I've wondered about a solution for this and it just struck me as I was out there. Signal strength is 35 now -- still marginal -- but that's due to the heavy cloud cover as opposed to any flakes on the dish.

Alex's plan is to leave on Saturday. I'll probably get him to help me take the Whaler out of the water before he leaves, otherwise Sandy will have to help me on Sunday, because our planned exit day is Monday. Monday, however, is supposed to be a rain day ... hmmm ... not much fun packing the car in the rain. Of course all that could change in the unlikely event that we actually get a deer and have to deal with it. "Deal with it" ... perhaps I have an attitude problem when it comes to actually cleaning a deer ?

Yesterday afternoon after we came back from hunting and in the light drizzle, we fished out front. Alex was casting from the shore while I had a minnow out with a bobber. Nothing. I guess that the winter's pike have not moved into the area yet.

Enough already ... onward ... or not.