Innholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2024 i Cottage Life

WEBINAR ON CHANGES TO CAPITAL GAINS Have you been wondering how the recently announced capital gains tax inclusion rate increase may affect you? Well, if you are in the process of handing down your cottage (or you plan to), it likely will. Luckily, with the help of succession expert and estate planning lawyer Peter Lillico, we can help! We recently hosted a webinar where Peter explained how much tax you can expect to pay under the new proposed rate and strategies for saving money on capital gains. Gain access to the webinar by signing up for Family Matters, our free newsletter on all things cottage succession, at cottagelife.com/newsletters. And keep your eye on cottagelife.com as we continue to cover the rate increase. The weekend starts in your inbox We’re adding…

The case for water witching I’m responding to “The $12,000 Hole to Nowhere” (May ’24), which seems to dismiss divining or witching as a means of locating a water well. My neighbour, an older man, insisted he knew how to find groundwater by divining. Using a forked stick, he pinpointed a spot on our property that he said would produce water. I drove a spike into the ground and called another water witcher. Before he arrived, I removed the spike and put an innocuous pebble in its place. The second man went over the area from several angles and settled on the same spot as the first water witcher. Both men said a drill on that spot would intersect two seams of water. Sure enough, as the drill bore down,…

COTTAGE COUNTRY FIGURES prominently in a push to wrap up the latest version of Ontario’s Breeding Bird Atlas. With the five-year census entering its fourth spring, Mike Burrell, the project’s coordinator with the Canadian Wildlife Service (one of five government and non-profit organizations partnering on the atlas) is looking to recruit citizen scientists to tally bird observations during the breeding season, from May 24 until late July. Volunteers are especially needed in central Ontario; that region has the most gaps in terms of data. “Cottagers are the best bet for getting coverage in places where we don’t have a lot of permanent residents,” says Burrell. “The biggest gaps are from North Bay to Parry Sound, Algonquin Provincial Park through the Ottawa Valley, and all the way to Sault Ste. Marie.”…

OUR SON, KYLE, and our daughter-in-law, Sam, were married at beautiful St. Peter’s Church on the Rock on Stony Lake, Ont., in July 2022. The church was enchanting, the cottage was beautiful, and the guests had a wonderful time. Because St. Peter’s is on an island, there was a fair amount of planning needed to transport all the guests from the cottage to the church. Everything went off without a hitch. Well, that’s not completely true. Guests started arriving at our cottage at 2:00 p.m. We’d lined up pontoon boats to pick them up from our dock and boat them to the island where the historic church is located. At one point, with so many guests moving onto the floating dock preparing to board the boats, the dock, large, but…

IF YOU NEED to remove a bearing (or a gear or pulley) from a shaft, a gear puller can grab it and pull, while keeping it aligned with the shaft so nothing jams or bends. These tools have a yoke with two or three jaws—I prefer three for even pull on all sides—and a central forcing screw. The jaws can also be flipped to reach inside a ring-shaped piece. Gear pullers come in a range of sizes: measure the distance from the shaft end to the opposite face of the bearing to determine which one you need.…

Graham Roumieu “I’m one of those classic stories of the kid who drew in class,” says Toronto-based illustrator Graham Roumieu. “I started with drawing Transformers in grade school, mostly in the margins of my notebooks.” And Graham hasn’t stopped drawing since. (Though his repertoire has expanded beyond transformable robots.) Throughout Graham’s 23-year career, he’s contributed graphics to Disney, DreamWorks, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many others. He’s also created a trio of Bigfoot-themed books, and has illustrated every Cottage Glossary since its debut in our May ’23 issue. “I always try to add a bit of a surprise factor,” says Graham of his approach to the illustrations. For this issue’s edition? “You know if that piece of toast goes in the water it’s doomed.” See the…

AT WABAMUN LAKE, in central Alberta, the shoreline has been eroding for more than 60 years. This lake is naturally subject to water events, such as heavy wave action and ice quakes (expansion of ice onto the shore during high water). Then, there are the human contributions. “I think it was an unintended consequence, but people who were coming out to the lake wanted a clear view—they didn’t want to have any vegetation between them and the water,” says Stan Franklin, a former board member of the Wabamun Watershed Management Council (WWMC). Historically, much of Wabamun Lake’s shores were lined with reed beds, composed of bulrush plants. The bulrushes, which can withstand a lot of water turbulence, served as a natural water break for other plants, such as cattails, which…

FOR WEEKEND WARRIORS who have painted, tiled, or hammered themselves into corners, it’s smart to call for advice so you can work safely and more efficiently. Online DIY coaching—a virtual service that allows you to speak directly to an experienced contractor or fellow DIYer—can be more valuable than scrolling through random YouTube videos or seeking guidance from teenage clerks at the hardware store, says John Sanders, who launched Reno DIY (renodiy.ca) in March. “I’ll give the client the advice they need to take on their project as if I’m right beside them, except they do the work. Plus, I’ll provide a little cheerleading to keep spirits high,” says Sanders, a general contractor near Orillia, Ont., with 40 years of experience. After fielding hundreds of DIY questions from his customers, including…

Q: I have a cabin with a flat roof. We don’t have gutters because the snow and ice would rip them off. But not having gutters to divert the water is damaging the exterior of the building. What are my alternatives? —Matthew Schwab, via email A: First of all, your roof probably isn’t entirely flat. “In the roofing world, we recognize a flat roof to mean that there’s still at least a two per cent slope,” says Russell Richman, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and a building science consultant. And you can use gutters (a.k.a. eavestroughs) with such a roof. People do. Plus, the kind of eavestrough busting damage that you’re concerned about could happen even if the roof wasn’t flat. In fact, “a sloped roof could be more…

A VISIT TO Crystal Palace begins with a paddle. Or, as the case may be, a brush with shoreline authorities. “Area patrolled by Black Lab Security Co.,” warns the sign affixed to a red pine at the boat launch. I’m admiring this bright metal placard, complete with a canine silhouette, when I realize my own stocky shadow has snuck off. Great. We haven’t yet slid our canoe into Ragged Lake, a secret-feeling spot in the Shield country south of Bancroft, Ont., and already we are making waves. I find the trespasser on the deck of a nearby cottage, pestering the owner. “Not a problem,” he insists. My dog proceeds to sniff around the base of his barbecue, licking a few planks. Peering at us through a screen door, meanwhile, is…

There are nearly 340 species of hummingbird in the world. Five call Canada home. Along with the calliope hummingbird, you can spot the:…

Amazing! I bought them for my two kids and that move ended up being a gift to myself. Wearing Croc Lights leaves my kiddos no excuses for misplacing their flashlights (thereby giving me a reprieve from constantly searching for misplaced ones). The tiny torches shed a surprising amount of light, just enough to keep the wearer aware of the little roots and rocks along the paths at the cottage or at camp. Fashion and function for the win! ($20; amazon.ca)…

SPENDING TIME AT the cottage involves spending time with creepy-crawlies, whether you love them or you hate them. Dock spiders and mosquitoes and water striders and bees…it’s a never-ending list. And those are only the ones that you actually see on a regular basis. Insects alone make up about 80 per cent of the world’s species, and they all play a huge role in the ecosystem. “Ants are often under-appreciated for all that they do,” says Bob Anderson, an entomologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature and a long-time CL source for all things buggy. “Tiny parasitoid wasps that people will never notice keep insect populations in check. Fly maggots, meanwhile, aid in decomposition of animal and plant material.” And some of the most miniscule of our cottage-country beasts—including minute…

THE PROBLEM WITH cottage country? Too many drips. “Despite our best engineering, leaks still happen,” says Sean Peterson, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering at the University of Waterloo. “Any sort of system or device we have, no matter what it is, eventually corrodes, wears down, or fails.” Don’t take it personally, it’s just physics. Peterson explains that high-pressure substances will always escape to low-pressure areas if they can. “Any pathway that emerges in the membrane separating the two provides a release,” Peterson says. Take a blow-up mattress, for example. When your cat—inevitably—claws a hole in it, the barrier containing the high-pressure air becomes compromised and the air just takes the path of least resistance out. Same goes for water escaping a pipe through a pinhole or blown connection.…

The brightly hued, easy-to-catch pumpkinseed sunfish is commonly the most abundant set of fins in warm, weedy shallows from New Brunswick to Manitoba. There are also introduced populations in B.C.; they arrived from the U.S. via the Columbia River system. With powerful jaws and molar-like teeth, the squat, flat fish crush snail shells, mussels, and aquatic insect larvae after sucking them up from submerged plant beds and muddy water bottoms. Some lakes have subpopulations of more streamlined pumpkinseeds. They have smaller jaws and longer, denser gill rakers (internal spiny rows at the base of the gills) to better strain plankton above rocky offshore shoals. Between late May and mid-July, male sun-fish use their tail fins to sweep out circular nests in water that’s as shallow as 15 cm. The nests…