Paul Leischow sent us another set of drone panoramas. He did these flights in the calm air of Tuesday evening.
Here’s how it works: click on the still picture below to connect to ReelMedia.org, where you can see a replay of the drone’s video. You can sit back and let the view pan around, or you can use your mouse cursor to manually swing the view to your favourite point of interest. You can tilt up and down, and even zoom in or out.
Looking east into Safety Bay and Rat Portage Bay. Click on the picture to load the Panoramas from April 9th.
The drone hovered over three separate places: Keewatin Bridge, the Yacht Club, and the Keewatin Channel. Each video has arrow markers for those spots. Click on them to make the jump from one location’s video to another.
Want to compare Tuesday’s panoramas to the ones from March 24th? I’ll make it easy; here’s a matching still from one of those that also has a link built in.
Looking east into Safety Bay and Rat Portage Bay. Click on the picture to load the Panoramas from March 24.
Remember, March ended with some cold days and nights, so things actually got worse before April rolled in. That means neither these two sets of panoramas show the fresh ice that formed halfway in between those dates, but it’s still fun to look at how things have changed. Open water in Keewatin Channel and Second Channel has almost encircled Channel Island now. Thanks, Paul!
Yesterday, one of my old friends who flies for MAG Canada sent me a batch of aerial photos. Andy Zabloski was doing the flying while Jorge Escrina snapped the pictures. They were circling around before landing at the Kenora airport.
Click on any of these pictures to see a full-screen, zoomable version without the tags.
This is one of their pictures from over Matheson Bay, showing Town Island and the Manitou.
Looking south west from Matheson Bay towards the Manitou.
Plenty of ice out there, of course, but it looks poor.
Keewatin Channel.
Some of this ice looks ready to give way.
Rat Portage Bay.
The ice here looks weaker than I expected. Rat Portage Bay has little current, which makes it slow to thaw and because of that, Gun Club Island is usually surrounded by ice roads that hold out late into the spring. If the ice here is rotten already, perhaps it’s due to the lack of protective snow cover this winter.
Safety Bay and Rat Portage Bay, looking east towards downtown Kenora.
This last shot was taken as Andy and Jorge prepared to line up with the Kenora runway, visible in the distance. Thanks guys!
One of the advantages of having a library of photos of the Lake of the Woods annual thaw is that I can go back and look at previous years. Here’s a picture Andy sent me one year ago.
In this overview of Keewatin Channel, Second Channel and Rat Portage Bay, the ice has some snow cover and looks much stronger. The current has opened up the channel, but the weather hasn’t really gone to work on the ice yet. Last year we were ice free just before the middle of May.
This year, we’re hoping to see the lake ice-free by April 21st, give or take a couple of days. The last year like that was 2021, when the ice was out by April 25th. Here’s a picture from Kelly Belair from April 10th of that year. It shows Keewatin Channel and Rat Portage Bay from further away, from a position over Poplar Bay.
Pine Portage Bay and Holmstrom’s Marsh, with Keewatin Channel in the middle distance towards Kenora at the far upper left.
2021 had a Cumulative Freezing Index of 1259, significantly colder than this winter’s 1004, so the ice was probably thicker then than now.
Coincidentally, I just heard from Kelly Belair. The ice is too rotten to support his little bush plane now, so he’s pulled it ashore to put it on floats. I’m looking forward to more pictures from him soon because he has a place out by the Devil’s Elbow, and the Barrier Islands are always fun to watch in the spring.
SIGNS OF SPRING:
- I drove through some intense rain-showers on the way back from Winnipeg yesterday. Wipers on high for a little while.
- Later, I got a few bug splats on my windshield.
- In the Whiteshell, the ice looked weak everywhere.
- The gulls are back in numbers now, and doing their twilight squawking.
- More birdsong, too, but I’m no expert.
- At least one of the birders has returned to the Tunnel Island trails.
- Those trails are nearly clear of snow and ice now, although there’s more on the north side of the island where there’s less direct sunshine.
We’re supposed to get several more days of warm weather, with highs in the double digits, then things will cool off for a day or two of rain and perhaps a few flurries. After that, things warm up again.
Lake of the Woods Ice Patrol 