Hydrobiking and purple loosestrife, summer 2015

Dwight Peck's personal website

Scenes from northern Wisconsin, summer 2015

More annual lakeside fun in the Northwoods

You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.

Hydrobikes on the lake

A little hydrobiking with Cousin Rob, a blustery 29 July

Hydrobiking with a headwind

Hydrobikes are not capsizable.

-- Look behind you.

Rapidly changing weather

Squirrel at rest

More choppy seas, 31 July

Northward toward the centre island, called Adjidaumo (from the talking squirrel in Longfellow's Hiawatha), to visit the eagles

Hydrobikes are good for a max of about 8 km per hour (5 mph), if you've had a good lunch and are living a healthy lifestyle, more or less. But headwinds change everything.

Though hydrobikes are not normally capsizable.

Most of the eagles aren't home today (just some tiny squeakers up in the family nest).

A party gone badly awry

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Rescuing Oscar and Cathy, 6 August

The cottage

Kristin's cottage, 7 August: the kitchen

The kitchen

The salon, so to speak, originally the core of the cottage, first built in the '30s . . .

. . . but added onto in all directions over the decades

The boathouse in the rain. Built in 1938, it's got some kind of historical building classification and couldn't be built out over the lakeshore under current shoreline regulations.

The boathouse (2/3 of it)

The clubhouse upstairs

Decades of hilarity have come and then passed on

Party on.

Trying in vain to get the bow turned into the wind. We're giving up.

Back to the boathouse, in the shelter of the point

Kristin's cottage from the lake

The Squirrel in dreamland

Purple Loosestrife

Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria), scourge of lakes and wetlands everywhere. "Infestations result in dramatic disruption in water flow in rivers and canals, and a sharp decline in biological diversity as native food and cover plant species, notably cattails, are completely crowded out, and the life cycles of organisms from waterfowl to amphibians to algae are affected. A single plant may produce up to 2.7 million tiny seeds annually" (Wikipedia).

In recent years, loosestrife has generally succumbed to biological pest controls (i.e., beetles) and become less of a universal problem, but residents on this lake have been so successful at hand-weeding it every year that it's not worth the expense and trouble of buying all the beetles. We just need to remain vigilant.

Today we're out loosestrifing on a grey day, 9 August, at a few of the recently spotted infestations

Kristin harvesting loosestrife on the shore of 'Raymond Island'

Vile little organisms -- unfortunately quite pretty in full flower, making the need for rooting them out of people's shorelines sometimes an educational project as well

And not only in Wisconsin. Here's Kristin with the accursed purple loosestrife in the Gran Paradiso national park in northern Italy, 2003

A musical interlude

A musical soirée for the seasonal group 'South Beach Up North', a cellist from Wausau now based in Florida who puts together trio chamber concerts with a few local musicians in the summers, this evening's "salon" sponsored by Elke (right).

An informal evening of mostly familiar pieces with anecdotes and commentary

Our cellist as dinner guest at The Boathouse in Minocqua

More hydrobiking

Cousin Rob is peering into the shallows of the reef in vain -- we were told that a big snapping turtle had been lurking here, but either it's moved on or it's smarter than we are.