Lark After Dark

The wind died down, the rain buggered off, and the lake was open for business again. I headed out to Chestermere Lake with my paddle board after work and hit the water post haste. I am made whole again.

I managed to get my board on the water by about ten minutes after 7:00 pm. There was a light breeze at the time, but it was manageable. Sunset was at 8:24 last night so I wasn’t going to get all the time on the lake I was hoping for.

First things first, however. I have been meaning to take my infrared modified Canon EOS 7D to Chestermere all month and I have regularly failed at it. I actually remembered to throw the camera bag into Vlad the Impala last night and grabbed a few snaps while my board was inflating. This was the best of the bunch.

One of my favourite things to do on any outing to the lake is to creep along the reeds and see the blackbirds playing in them. This section seemed to be all yellow-capped blackbirds.

The wind started to die down about half an hour before sunset allowing me to start making better time on the water. The breeze still came up sporadically at times, but it didn’t last. I was mostly there to try and hit my eight kilometer target that night, but I did try to take advantage of what opporunities presented themselves.

I also had some fun following along behind the wildlife. Many of the ducks aren’t that fussed about paddle boarders if they are slow moving and not splashing around a lot.

There wasn’t much boat traffic on the north side, thankfully, and the boaters were generally well-behaved. All of the boats stuck to the speed limit for a change. The thing is that I have been on the lake enough this summer that I am learning which boats belong to which homes, so I have started to think of the owner of one as The Douche Knuckle.

This guy has blasted past me well over the speed limit on the north side of the lake too many times and been flipped the bird as a result. My board is pretty stable in boat wake, but a large boat ripping past without much distance between the two of you produces some scary wake.

There were practically no clouds in the sky last night, just a few stragglers hanging down by the horizon like sullen teenagers in a Circle K parking lot. The resulting sunset was uninspiring to say the least.

You can see some incoming wake on the water, and, yup, it was The Douche Knuckle going back and forth on the north side of the lake, threading through the kayaks and paddle boards. Asshat.

The lake surface was quite placid when Douche Knuckle was off roaring around the south side of the lake, and a real pleasure to be on. My camera can read ambient temperature and it was 26C when I hit the lake and it was still 22C nearly half an hour after sundown.

The light dropped quickly after sunset at 8:24 pm so I was glad to have my lighting rig with me. I’ve got my headband with a flexible LED headlamp and red LED tail lamp, LED vest with blue strips front and back, and I clip LED marker lights to my board. Red for starboard, green for port, and two white markers clipped to the back to indicate the stern making me fully legal after nightfall. I’m easy enough to see that I frequently notice kids on the shore pointing me out to parents.

Not everyone observes regulations like I do. Allow me to introduce the Fucking Idiot of the Week. You can barely see it, but there is a boat above offloading close to fifteen passengers. You can’t see it because its fuckwit owner is out after dark without a single functioning marker light on his craft. In addition to this, the boat was dangerously overloaded with people, not a single one of them wearing a life jacket. It passed me a couple of times and it was riding so low in the water I’m surprised the lake didn’t flood in over the stern and sink the damn thing.

Where the hell is law enforcement when this crap his happening on the lake every night?

It was dark enough by 9:24 pm that I had to throw in the towel a full hour after sunset. I couldn’t see where I was going easily at that point and if there was a boat on the water without markers I sure as heck wouldn’t be able to see it. I could hear a couple of jetskis still going south of the bridge so it seemed like a good time to make for the dock and call it a night. I actually had trouble picking out the dock along the shore.

I am tickled pink over the fact that I hit my goal of 8 km for the evening. Indeed, it was exactly 8 km on the button. I’ll take that. You can see from the zoomed GPS track at top left that I stayed in the north part of the lake away from the bulk of the boat traffic, circling it twice and then traveling back and forth along the west shore. I briefly poked my nose south of the bridge, but it was all boat wake and churned up weeds clogging the surface of the water so I retreated north again.

A measurement of the south portion of the lake on the zoomed out track shows that I have to travel 8.2 km to circumnavigate it. I came pretty close to that last night, and I could have easily done the 11.8 km it takes to go around the entire lake if I hadn’t run out of light and time. Fingers crossed that I can do the whole lake this weekend, or at least pull off 12 km in one outing, which is an equivalent distance.

It feels really good to have improved the conditioning of my arms to this point since the start of the season.

Infrared image made using a modded Canon EOS 7D with a Canon EFS IS USM 17-85mm f4.5-5.6 lens. All other images and videos made using an OM System (formerly Olympus) Tough TG-7.