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Red Lake Bush Adventures - Boat house monitoring |
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Red Lake, Chimo base, 4. July 03
Fellow nomads, |
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| At the 4th of july, we again rented two boats at Chimo boat rental services. One was driven by Coop, the other one by me (Hak). We decided that it would be more secure to ferry the passenger Sgt Stefschnitz with Coop, since I still am not that used to the sheer power of the speed boats... We left Chimo harbour around 16:30 local time and enjoyed the trip towards Sabourin base. However, enjoying does not mean we didn't pay attention to any detail that couls help us in getting one step further with this whole story. |
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| When we arrived at Sabourin, we slowed down to damp the engine noises. The plan was to drive around the islands and see if we can find any clues of the yellow speedboat that Coop an I saw leaving Sabourin base days ago. We were sailing around quite a moment, sharply looking behind each rock and bush, but we could not detect anything unusual on the islands. We even did apology to the two love turtles we brought up in the middle of their engagement... gniiihiii. |
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| Anyway... We rented the boats for two days, and the night was falling upon us like a dark courtain, so we decided to call it a day and go back to Sabourin base for a discussion and further planning. It is a stunning view to slowly sail towards Sabourin base, when the lodge and the hangar (boat house) are lit. A trip that I can only recommend to all of you. We did a thorough analysis of all the facts we have so far, and Sgt. Stefschnitz agreed that the only valuable track is the abandoned boat house on the opposite side of the lake, north-west of Sabourin base. (See previous report). |
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| Sabourin base, 5. July 2003 |
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| We proceeded with our island screening in the early morning of this new, beautiful day. Again, we spent hours sailing around, but found no trace of the boat , the Norseman monument, and also no trace of Cpt. Brick. Will we ever find some hints? One might start to loose faith... Just when the sun began to sink, we were again located near the rocky islands, in direct view to the abandoned boat house and mine buildings. What could we expect? Nothing. But it was the only lead... so we just satyed in our boats, watching the sunset, and monitoring any activity around us. |
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| A few minutes before the darkness would make it difficult to see anything that isn't dipped in artificial light, we heard some noises flaoting over the water, but the steady wind made it difficult to judge the location of the source. Suddenly, Coop yelled someting about seeing blinking lights near the abandoned mine - and a few seconds later, we saw something approaching us pretty fast. And another couple seconds later, we saw "it" taking off. It was a plane!!! |
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| The plane passed over our heads with only a few dozen feet agl, but the darkness and our shut down engine (and thus also dark position lights) made it probably impossible for the pilot to see us sitting down there in our boats. For me, everything went too fast to recognise anything except the fact that it was a seaplane. However, Sgt. Stefschnitz demonstrated the well known situational awareness and "stay calm" atitude of the RCMP. He took many pictures. We will have to analyse them carefully to get more hints on the origin of the aircraft. If you can recognise anything from the shown pics, please drop us a note immediately, so we can integrate that hint to our ongoing analysis. Thank you. |
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| Here's another picture taken by Stefschnitz, showing my boat and the airplane passing over me quite low. You certainly understand that we were all highly excited, since this was the first real and good hint as to what could be going on here lately. We still don't know much more, but now we have seen a speedboat leaving Sabourin base, and probably heading for the abandoned boat house, and now we saw a yellow seaplane leaving that very location... We need more information, but this was more than we were hoping to get after two days of searching... |
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| by that time, the darkness was increasing, and we knew that we will not see anything else today. So we decided to sail back to Sabourin base, discuss the events, analyse the pictures and decide if we should call Chimo boat rentals and let Sgt. Stefschnitz make them clear that the boats are now involved in the RCMP activity, making it easy to "rent" them as long as we need them... Coop, Stefschnitz and I all were pretty tired, but the excitement kept us awake for hours. If you have some time, join us in the Lakeview restaurant for the SITREP and dicussion. Keep the blue side down (if you're in a boat) Hak |
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