Spring/Summer 2008

Swimming in Slurpee Lake

• Posted on April 20, 2008 at 10:12 PM
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“High Lake, April 19”

OK, so maybe it's not the smartest weekend of my life. It's the weekend of April 19-20, and while Saskatoon got about 40 cm of snow, and Victoria and Vancouver were all crashy and shovelly because of snow of their own, southern Ontario was WICKED.

Mid 20s temperatures, beautiful sun, like July in cottage country except for two things:

1) no bugs
2) ice all over the lake! OK, not actually frozen all the way end to end, but check out the photos! In most places there were solid sheets of ice across big expanses. Then, when you broke the ice up, you'd get these sharp little crystals floating all over the surface, turning the lake into a giant Slurpee.

So whatcha gonna do, but jump right in and do the unthinkable. First swimming, then kayaking. Dave was the first one in the water. He and I were in on May 1 last year, but there was no ice at that point. I wasn't sure if we were going to do the almost-polar-bear swim this year, but Dave was in without hesitation. So I followed. We weren't in for long, but we did go in. We went back on on Sunday, too.

After the swim, we got in the kayaks (just recreational sit-on-tops), and headed into the thin ice. It was fun carving through it. There was no wind, no waves, no ice motion, so we just ploughed through. Totally like an icebreaker, cutting channels through stuff that had been frozen all winter.

On Sunday the reality of what we did sunk in a bit more. There was wind, and the ice was shifting and moving around, and I realized that paddling in the ice like that wasn't necessarily the safest thing. Even moving at a slow speed, it would have carried a lot of force and possibly could have flipped us into the water. Though I didn't feel any danger on Saturday, I don't think I'll be doing the paddling again next year.

But now we have to beat April 19 as the earliest swim of the year.