What Happens When the Town Goes Out Of Town

The long weekend in May is the annual fishing derby in Whale Cove - and it's a pretty big deal. It's not hard to understand why when you know that the first prize for the biggest fish is $7000! Even 10th prize is $500.

Anyone who has a cabin (and many do) heads out some time on Friday or early Saturday morning. Many without cabins will pack up a tent or two and head out onto the land as well. Cabins can be anywhere from 30 minutes to more than 2 hours away and as long as Hudson Bay is still frozen (as it is now), they will get there by snowmobile, pulling their equipment behind in a kammotiq.


When the ice is gone or too soft, they'll travel over land by four-wheeler. They're fishing for arctic char, cod and trout mainly, but pretty much anything goes.

So what happens when the town leaves town? For starters, the shelves at the Co-op look like this:


Everyone stocked up last week for their weekend out.
But that's okay because the Co-op closed early today anyway! Curtis (the Co-op manager) said on Friday that he was expecting a shipment on the weekend and he'd be open today (Monday) from 12:00 - 5:00. When we arrived just after 1:00 he locked the door behind us and said he was closing early because he had no staff! We picked up a few things from what was left. We'll get through the next few days and the shelves will likely be restocked early this week. Crisis averted!

Things are pretty quiet here in town with lots of folks out on the land. We went out for a long walk on Saturday to some areas that we hadn't visited before. You can see that the snow is melting and there is lots more exposed rock, but there's still a long way to go. We will not see open water on the bay before we go, except perhaps from the air. Here's a view of town looking northwards from the point:




With only seven days of school left for students it won't be long till we're beginning our long trek home. Looking forward to going outside in flip-flops, without stopping to put on wind pants and a parka!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sundays in Whale Cove

Image
This was our first Sunday in our new home!  We went for a walk down to the harbour and there was a great view of Hudson Bay!  It was a windy Day.  The Weather App told us that with the wind chill it was -42 celcius!  Kids were tobogganing without covered faces.  Everyone who goes by waves and says hello!   We discovered that the COOP which is the one store in town is not open on Sundays, so we decided to head back after we stopped at the Bay. Then we had a call from the DEA secretary. She is the District Educational Authority secretary.  Sort of like a local set of Trustees.  Her daughter works for CALM Air and had let her mother know that our shipped goods had arrived.  So  Agatha, the secretary called the local bus driver and asked him to fire up the bus and head to the airport to pick up our stuff.  We have no vehicle and the airport is about 7 km away.  The other option we would have had was to check what the local RCMP was...
Read more

Covid Test for Ian is negative

Image
  Ian's Covid test came back negative which is a relief.  We are allowed to go outside to walk in the back parking lot supervised while he has symptoms but can't walk at the front where we might see other people and come into contact with them.  We did 20 laps this morning that worked out to just over 5 km with our awesome new boots on! Meanwhile, we spend lots of our time indoors studying the Nunavut Education Documents.  They are really interesting.  I have been looking into what is called "Land Based Instruction" and came across the list below.  Clearly we will be learning a lot! 
Read more