Yukon bush life

(Lou, Yukon) We’ve drilled holes in the bottom of our boat. Why not? A few holes in the transom can only improve things. The weather warmed up to -7c yesterday, time to get the power tools and get a few jobs done. The Garmin Fish Finder instructions told us to drill two holes in the boat. It suggested not to do this whilst afloat. Can’t think why? Good job they pointed that out. I was a bit nervous so we spent ages fiddling with the bracket and screws to make sure it was absolutely in the right place before drilling. It wasn’t, so we now have extra holes that we’ll have to fill or spend a lot of time bailing. Why fit a fish finder in March? We’ve heard about ice fishing so thought it might be fun to winch the boat across the river and look for grayling through 10 foot of ice. Let’s see how well this baby works. No, even we’re not that mad. We will use the device in the summer as a depth sounder to stop us hitting gravel bars and tearing chunks out of another $200 propel...

Temperatures are down to -12C at night and below zero during the day. The creek is freezing over and ice is beginning to form at the river bank.  With our boat now out of the river, we are cut off from the world maybe until next year. We can’t travel again until the Yukon is frozen and we’ve managed to get a trail either 60 miles south to Dawson or 30 miles north to the old mining road. Until then we are in splendid isolation.  Moose receipts and laundry- all the glamour of our last trip to town And so we made our final boat journeys last week. We did our last supply run to Dawson for this year and, for once, got to town on a weekday that wasn’t a public holiday so all the shops were open! A cause for celebration though we had no time to.  Days are getting shorter and with at least 4 hours of driving once we got out of the boat it was a race against time to get everything done. We were on the river at first light around 8am- it was bastard cold still, at 12 be...