PaBIA's eBlast September 1, 2021

PaBIA's Vision: To Preserve This Unique Natural Habitat for Generations to Come

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Volume 13 No. 26

Greetings!

Who would have thought that we are already looking at Labour Day 2021? With July wet and cool, August mostly provided us with warm sunny weather, calm winds, and "take a dip to cool off' days! The paddleboarding and kayaking have been spectacular, renewing old friends a pure joy, and a time to remind ourselves that, despite everything going on around us, we are so fortunate to be in an unforgettable place with wonderful, caring people. Building relationships is what life is all about.

Fire Danger Upgraded

Last weekend, though, we had slightly cooler temperatures, certainly good sleeping weather, with winds out of the east and even some welcomed heavy downpours! Saturday was a good day for reading by the fireplace! Unfortunately, the Bud Body Sailing Race had to be canceled...but will look to Labour Day weekend for another opportunity!!

Sunday night brought us a beautiful storm...click on the middle pic - a video...just enjoy the sounds!

Upcoming storm

Aug 29

Video of the Storm (click on the pic)

Sunset After Storm

In this eBlast:

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER

Bonus Sailing Race Saturday, Sept 4 @ 2 p.m.
Put up Your PaBIA Cottage Patrol Tags for FALL, WINTER, SPRING Patrols
Notice of PaBIA AGM: Tuesday, September 21 @ 7 p.m. EDT
Tennis for Everyone (member or not) at the Ojibway beginning after Labour Day
H₂0 2021 by GBA and GBF Series of 3 Webinars: October 23, Nov., and Dec.

OF INTEREST

New Director Position for Indigenous Affairs & Liasion to Shawanaga First Nation
Proposed new Director, Mark Gwozdecky, for IA & Liaison to SFN
Safety on the Water While Enjoying the Fun
LIterally on the Bay by Janet Irving, Education Committee
Already? by Trudy Irvine, Education Committee
This Week: Water Levels: Regulations and IJC by Helen Bryce, Education Committee
GBA: Supporting Decibel Coalition
Lake Michigan-Huron Water Levels - August 31, 2021
Yearbook Update 2021 from August 26
Lost and FOUND - White hauled boat found on A 231

September 2021

Bonus Race! Saturday,

September 4 at 2:00 pm.

We are having a race this week just for fun and bragging rights of course!

The course will be the PaBAR Turning Island course (South East of Turning Island). Please check in with the race committee at least 5 min. before the start.

Notice of AGM:

Tuesday, September 21 @ 7 pm EDT via Zoom

Please be advised that a member may ask that an item be added to the Annual Meeting. The Bylaws provide that the member must provide written notice to the President no less than 14 days prior to the Annual Meeting. Further, the member must provide sufficient background and detail to allow that Board to consider same.

We will outline the final agenda next week.

Safety on the Water While Enjoying the Fun!

Let's keep the end of summer a safe one for everyone.

IF you are towing anyone on skies, wakeboards, a tube, etc., please know that there MUST be a spotter as well as the driver in the boat PLUS room for the ones being towed. For example, if a jet ski is a three-seater, there is room for only one person being towed.

Why do you need a spotter you ask? Check it out here!

Post Season Tennis For Everyone at The Ojibway Club After Labour Day

Post Season Tennis For Everyone at

The Ojibway Club After Labour Day

Pre and Post season tennis will be available to anyone (member or not) who wishes to play on a daily basis at 10 a.m. with a 2 p.m. rain delay.

Also, our annual " Granite Cup" tennis tournament will be held on Saturday, September 25th with a rain date of Sunday, September 26th. Please show up at 10 AM. Pot Luck luncheon to follow at the Honsberger's A510-9. If you need any further information please contact Brad or text him. His cell phone is in the Yearbook.

OF INTEREST

COTTAGE PATROL TAGS

Before closing at the end of the season, please attach your patrol tags to your main cottage and any other buildings for which you’re purchased extra tags for the fall ’21, winter and spring ’22 patrols.

Proposed PaBIA Director - Mark Gwozdecky

Our First Nations forbearers helped to shape and build what we now know and love as Pointe au Baril. Many years ago, our Shawanaga First Nation neighbours were an integral part of our community. Sadly, over time, that changed. We recognize there is a tremendous opportunity for reconciliation, cross-cultural learning and much to be done to rebuild those relationships. PaBIA is pleased to announce a new role within its board of Directors, Indigenous Affairs & Liasion with Shawanaga First Nations.

With his many years serving Canada’s Diplomatic Corp, Mark Gwozdecky is the ideal candidate.

Born and raised in Thunder Bay, Mark spent more than 50 years in his family cottage near Lake Superior before purchasing a cottage in Laura Bay 5 years ago.

In 2019 he retired from a 37 year career as a Canadian diplomat during which time he served in Korea, the Philippines, Syria, Lebanon, Vienna, and as Canada’s Ambassador to Jordan and Iraq.

In the past year he has served as one of PaBIA’s representatives on the Georgian Bay Association. His familiarity with the federal government was called upon in the GBA’s advocacy strategy to allow our international cottagers to regain access to their cottages after 16 months of absence. During this past year, he was also asked to take on responsibilities as PaBIA’s liaison with the Shawanaga First Nation (SFN). In this regard, he developed a strategy to increase PaBIA’s awareness of indigenous issues as well as engagement and cooperation with SFN, including on phragmites eradication and water quality testing.

He lives in Ottawa with his wife Wendy and has 5 grown children.

Literally on the Bay

Book recommendations by Charlotte Stein, owner of Parry Sound Books www.parrysoundbooks.com.

Edited by Janet Irving, Education Committee.

There is nothing – absolutely nothing - like reading a book on a summer’s day on Georgian Bay! This summer we suggest some books that are literally set on the Bay – or feel so much so that we just had to include them.

Sounding Thunder,

by Brian D McInnes, is a biography of Francis Pegahmagabow, who was a born in Shawanaga and lived in Wasauksing. McInnes provides valuable cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and historic insights on the life of this local legend who was the inspiration for several books.

Pegahmagabow –

Life Long Warrior

by Adrian Hayes is not only about Pegamagabow’s wartime service with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces, but his fight to achieve control over his own destiny as an aboriginal Canadian.

Three Day Road,

an exceptional novel by Joseph Boyden, was inspired by the life of Francis Pegahmagabow and that of his own father, a war time medical doctor.

Janet Irving - so many, many thanks for all your efforts to keep us so well networked to great Bay reading!

What Impacts Our Water Levels,

What Does The Future Bring, and

What Can We Do About It?

This week: Regulations and IJC

Prior Weeks: Diversions; Inflow and Outflow; Precipitation & Evaporation

by Helen Bryce, Director of Education

The third and least impactful to water levels in the Great Lakes is regulation: a hornet’s nest of special interests, politics, government communication, cooperation, and decision-making, and now climate change uncertainty.

REGULATIONS AND THE INTERNATIONAL JOINT COMMISSION

REGULATION

While there are two major artificial control points within the Great Lakes – the power plants on the St. Marys River and the Moses-Saunders Dam on the St Lawrence River – there are serious physical limits on how much they can do to affect water levels.
The existing structures on St. Marys and St. Lawrence Rivers can only influence water levels by a matter of inches by adjusting outflows and need to take conditions on both sides of the structures into account.
In each case, the Canadian and United States governments have agreed to specific and complex regulation plans (known as Plan 2012 and Plan 2014) that consider all affected interests in managing these flows.
But they are not the final word on water conditions in such a massive system. Mother Nature remains in the driver’s seat and ultimately the course we take is up to her.

Is the IJC controlling water levels or not?

An IJC study in 2012 suggests that 40-74% of the cause of record low water levels in the 1990s and early 2000s was due to climate change which had shifted the balance between precipitation and evaporation.
This study shows water levels would have been very close to what they were regardless of government decisions about the two control structures.
However, over a several-year period, it has been shown that the operation of the control structures can change water levels. This happened in 2019 and 2020 in Lake Ontario after record precipitation levels the year before.
Long story short, the IJC studies whatever the two governments require and has made recommendations regarding control structures to the US and Canadian governments but these recommendations have not always been acted upon.
In the end, the IJC can only recommend it to the US and Canadian governments. They have no power to take action on their own and they have no control over the diversions previously outlined.

So what can governments do?

The US and Canadian governments have proven their capability to move forward on joint projects that will enhance their economies.
A case in point occurred during the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway where drastic alterations to the connecting channels and the removal of an island in the St. Lawrence River were made.
Such alterations had nothing to do with controlling water levels at the time.
Joint projects of this nature move at a glacial pace from concept to an agreement to shovels-in-the-ground.
Now due to Climate Change, water levels can only be accurately predicted for up to 6 months so cannot be changed artificially in such a short amount of time.
Trying to anticipate and respond within a 6-month time constraint is not something that any government or agency is calling for.
So even though the common perception suggests that governments can control water levels, they actually have little control over water levels.

Next week includes ideas and recommendations on how to streamline and better coordinate the multiple systems existing on the Great Lakes as well as the data being collected. And who, ultimately, should be held accountable for the Great Lakes water levels?

Online resources

Approaches to Climate Change

Already?

by Trudy Irvine, Education Committee

How can it be that the end of summer is around the corner? It seems the season just got going - in a lovely warm rush of peaches and cherries, breezy picnics and shoal hopping, fluttering monarchs, and long-awaited visits with American friends. Alas, Father Time and Mother Nature are pooping our party, and some Pointe au Baril cottagers have begun to trail home or at least been sternly warned that autumn is approaching.

This year, animal sightings overall seemed to be down (perhaps because we spent July huddled indoors to escape the record rainfall) … but sightings of snakes were way up!

Some of the animals observed this summer will soon be on their way:

Sandhill crane pairs will fly south to the southern US and northern Mexico with their single offspring of the year in tow. They will form large flocks of up to thousands of birds along the way and in their wintering grounds. Their journey back and forth between wintering grounds and summer breeding grounds is “one of the world’s largest and oldest bird migrations”.

And some animals will remain for the winter:

Snakes will return to established “hibernacula” for the cold season. These lairs come in many forms (rock crevices, stumps, existing animal holes), but generally, they must lie below the frost line or in microclimates otherwise protected from freezing. Hibernacula must also provide consistent humidity, as desiccation is more of a danger than starvation for sluggish “brumating” snakes. (Mammals hibernate but “brumate” is the term for a reptile’s winter dormancy.) Snakes become sluggish when temperatures drop below 60F (16 C) and declining temperatures will cause them to seek out the area near their hibernacula.
Chipmunks will enter their winter burrows sometime in November. These deeper passages and chambers are also below the frost line, and well provisioned with stockpiles of food. Chipmunks enter periods of “torpor” in the winter, where their body temperature, rate of breathing, and heart rate drop to very low levels for days at a time.
White-tailed deer will travel up to nearly 100km to their wintering areas, known as “deer yards”. These areas are spots protected from winter winds and heavy snowfalls by conifers (often around swamp areas) and provide both food and shelter for the deer that gather there. Deer can accumulate up to 30% of their body weight in fat stores in the fall- essential for a lean winter when their preferred leafy foods are absent. Deer also shed their lighter summer coat for a heavier, darker, more oily winter coat to help keep them warm and dry.
Porcupines, never an animal to move very far or very fast, shrink their usual summer feeding range of up to 1.5km from their den to down to 100m. They will feed more during the day rather than at night, as is the case in the summer, favoring the bark and needles of conifers. Their short legs and heavy bodies can cause them to create little tunnels in the snow on favoured pathways.
We know all we need to know (and then some) about how Deer Mice and their brethren spend the winter…

Hopefully, torpor and denning will not be the only possibilities open to the cottage residents of Pointe au Baril this coming winter, and we will meet again first thing next summer - ready for more picnics, more shoal hopping, and more enjoyment of nature and each other’s friendship over the course of a long and sunny season.

Many many thank yous to Trudy Levine for presenting us each week with new and interesting articles on what is all around us!

Please Add Your Support to the Decibel Coalition

The Decibel Coalition is a Safe Quiet Lakes (SQL) initiative aimed at introducing Canadian legislation to curb excessive boat noise similar to legislation already in place in the US and Europe. The Coalition wants to expand the Canada Small Vessel Regulations (SOR/2010-91) to include decibel limits on engine noise.

Currently over 50 member associations and municipalities have signed on to support this important initiative, but SQL would like your vote to help make an impact at this fall’s Canadian Marine Advisory Council (CMAC) meeting with Transport Canada.

I encourage you to consider adding your name and your association as an Operation Decibel Coalition Member to support this important initiative.

More information can be found on GBA’s website here. To add your association’s support, please contact Rob Bosomworth.

October 2021

Save the Dates for H20 2021 by GBA and GBF

Extreme Water Levels: Impacts and Strategies

Following on our successful Water Levels Symposium from last year, GBA is once again teaming up with Georgian Bay Forever to host H₂0 2021 - Extreme Water Levels: Impacts and Strategies.

We will be hosting three, two-hour webinars, on Saturday mornings starting on October 23.

Topics will include:

Action Plan 2030 - Progress Report
Impact Report: Flora and Fauna
Protecting your Property & Shoreline
Planning for More Intense Storms
How Vulnerable is Your Septic System?
Weather and Property Insurance - What You Need to Know
How Extreme Weather Impacts Municipal Infrastructure, Shoreline Businesses and How You Build
And Much More

Speakers will be announced as the events get closer. Watch for details!

Lakes Michigan/Huron Water Levels Aug 31, 2021 To better read the charts, please click on the chart for the Daily or Six Month Forecast Water level chart and the corresponding websites

Yearbook Update! (as of Aug 26^th)

With each eBlast, we will provide you a list of names for those members who have provided updated contact information. The details of all the changes since the 2021 yearbook came out in late April are provided in THIS printable format for you to print out and insert into your own Yearbook!