Yukon bush life

(Lou, Vancouver Airport) A girl’s dream has come true! I’ve often thought, when paying some mechanic for work on my car, I bet I’m getting fleeced here. I wish I knew more about engines. Well, piece by piece, I’m learning how a two-stroke engine works. Three days before we leave for England and one day before we have to take our very large husky, an impossible amount of laundry and various other things to town, the bloody Polaris Widetrak broke down again. It exploded in spectacular style with toxic luminous green coolant spraying out from under the hood like a psychedelic geyser. It is, I now know, simply a broken belt on the water pump that we can easily replace. If we had one. And if we weren’t leaving the country imminently. We had to get to town early the next morning and so abandoned it. In fact, we were quite tempted to leave the damn thing to go out with the ice in spring break up Thank God we had our little ’94 Polaris Indy Lite, Piccolo. We set of...

(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...