Jeffrey Vanneste’s Personal Blog

I went up to my parents cabin in Meeting lake on Friday night. Renny had been there since Wednesday and Rach was coming up as soon as she finished work on Friday. I got to the lake around 2:30pm, just in time to catch my parents and brother heading out for a swim. Since it was 30′C I jumped into my wet suit and we went for a quick swim/ski.

Friday night we ate some “poor man’s lobster” as my parents called it. I don’t quite remember how it was cooked but it was essentially jackfish cut up and cooked in salt water and then dipped in garlic butter. It was pretty good except for when you missed fish bones and had a throat full of bones. We played a game of Hearts in the evening which I proclaimed I would win. I successfully got “shoot the moon” once but failed at it a few times. In the end I was the winner and now my family has to hear me remind them about my victory for another year.

Saturday morning we went out to Spiritwood golf course and played 9 holes. I bought 30 golf balls since I was expecting to lose a lot (which I did). My big accomplishment was driving 270 yards and still having the ball on the fairway. After golf we went out for another ski (this time with Rach around) and had her take some pictures.

Saturday night we started playing a round robin Kaiser tournament but our games were ended when some of my parent’s friends came by to visit. It was for the best since I lost every game so far. At around 11pm we lost power in the cabin when a big storm came in. Our boat was anchored out by our dock when our visitors left. When Dad went out to the car to listen to the radio to see if there were any pertinent weather warnings he noticed our boat was gone! Dad comes running into the cabin completely drenched saying that our boat had blown over to the main dock and got snagged on something. We were pretty lucky that it got snagged or we would have been searching for the boat the next day.

So instead of just leaving the boat snagged on the main dock or attempting to tie it up properly to the main dock it was decided we should take the boat out of the water in the middle of the storm. Good times. It probably wouldn’t have been too bad if it wasn’t in the middle of the night and pitch black but we weren’t so lucky. Our first task was driving down the long dock backwards with no lights. I ran beside the van while Renny backed up slowly. The only lights we had were the break lights on the back of the van. Eventually we got to the end of the dock with the trailer and Dad jumped into the water, pulled the boat over to the trailer and we hooked up the chain from the trailer onto the boat. I was pretty worried about being out on the lake while the storm was going on so as soon as we got the boat hooked up I turned the crank on the trailer as fast as I could while Dad guided the boat onto the trailer. Once we got the boat on the trailer Dad and I jumped into the van completely drenched (even though I was wearing a rain coat it didn’t help much when I was in the water) and brought the boat back to the cabin.

When we got back to the cabin Rach was very displeased that we had went into the lake to get the boat out. It probably wasn’t the brightest idea but in the end it all turned out good. I don’t expect we will ever have to do something like that again. It turned out the storm knocked over a lot of trees all over the place. There were some vehicles damaged around the park so we were better off than most. We didn’t get power back in the cabin until 2pm the next day.

Sunday we had a pretty slow day as I got the flu (go figure) so I just took it pretty easy. Since we didn’t get power until 2pm we spent most of the day worrying about food thawing out so we started eating all the good stuff in the fridge and freezer.