I came home early today because of heavy snow up north. That allowed me to take a few pictures at 10:30 this morning.
This is the area just north of the Kenora Bypass, looking south west over Norman and Keewatin.

In the middle distance, you can trace the Kenora Bypass as it crosses Dufresne Island. Close to the nose of the plane is Sweeney Channel, and on the far side of Dufresne is Palmerston Channel. Lots of open water here, and I wish my flight path had taken me closer to Minaki for a better look at more of the Winnipeg River.
On towards town.

I took this picture to show how things are going on Safety Bay, but the photograph is centred on Tunnel Island. If you’re a regular on the hiking trails there, as I am, you’ll be able to spot the railway bridge, the pond on the Sandy Nook trail, the Norman Dam, and other landmarks. If you like to hike a little, I recommend these trails, but they are in rough condition right now, due to deep snow and ice. Maybe hold off until the ticks are out. Ahem. Anyway, There’s not much change along the harbourfront.

This last shot is really just a closer look at the same thing, but it shows Devil’s Gap and Keewatin Channel a bit better, if you zoom in.
We’ve come to the end of March, and so far there’s been no sign of the warm spring that was in the long-term seasonal outlook. Temperatures this month stayed mostly at or below normal, with only one or two nicer days. A normal high this time of year is around 4ºC, and a typical overnight low would be about -6ºC. The two-week forecast doesn’t show us getting that warm for another week.
That means we won’t reach the inflection point, when we start spending more time above freezing than below, (more precisely, when the daily mean temperature is above freezing) until the weekend of April 6th and 7th. That’s about two weeks later than I expected. After that, we might see some slightly warmer than normal temperatures. Nothing in the double digits, though.
In the meantime, it’s snowing as I write this. The bad weather I encountered up north this morning has reached Kenora. While the forecast called for light snow tapering off to flurries this afternoon, I see that the aviation weather is reporting the visibility as 3/4 of a mile, which is officially considered moderate snow, not light. In more casual terms, I’d say it’s coming down pretty hard.
Sad to say, that’s going to restore a lot of our ice cover to a nice bright, reflective white layer. Not helping.
Tomorrow is Satellite Saturday on Lake of the Woods Ice Patrol. I doubt we’ll have a satellite shot from today—it’s too cloudy—but we can look back over the week and see what changed. I’ll also use the archives to compare this spring to some recent years, to show how things seem to be shaping up.