A beautiful end to the holiday weekend on Monday. Lots of sunshine, and light winds all day long. The afternoon topped out at 75F. About 15F above normal for this time of year. Tuesday should continue to be quite nice with the afternoon once again near 70F. That all comes to an end overnight tonight with a cold front bringing rain and much cooler temperatures on Wednesday. The longer-range forecast shows this coming weekend to be cold and wet for the entire duration.
The weather the last few days was a lot better than the Blue Jays pitching.
The lake has reached the lower theoretical level for fall drawdown, which is 313.00 meters above sea level. Today it is at 312.98. We have been dealing with lake levels that were lower than normal all summer. A combination of a leak under the log at the dam (which was fixed in early August) and the drought. July through September rainfall was about 7 inches below normal.
Thanksgiving has been a bit of a sore spot for me for about a decade now. Sometime in the late teens I posted on my website, had signs on the store door and in the boathouses that I would be closed Sunday afternoon so that I could celebrate Thanksgiving with family. I returned Monday morning before 8AM to open the store and found a VERY nasty note from a customer complaining that I had no business being closed on a busy holiday weekend and that they would never do business with me again. And they held true to that. My one afternoon off the entire season cost me a customer. I never closed on a holiday weekend again.
The OLT hearing regarding Limerick Estates has been postponed from Monday October 6th until an as yet undetermined date. The parties involved are looking at sometime in January. This is a 40-year tactic of the developer. Delay hearings for months, sometimes years, then blame the municipality for being obstructionist when the hearing finally happens. Been there, done that with these folks through the years. Our mayor pledges not to let them wear her (or Hastings County) down. Link to the hearing cancellation notice: (copy and paste it into your browser, this editor does not support hyperlinks)
https://lwra.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/OLT-25-000357-Merit-Hearing-October-6-2025-Adjournment-1.pdf
Current status on boating access to Dixon Lake: A sub-committee of the Board of Directors of the LWRA had an in-person meeting with MNR staff in Bancroft on Tuesday September 23rd. Here is a link to a summary of the meeting:
https://lwra.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/MNR-meeting-sept-2025.pdf
The Rogers 5G tower on Sutton Rd. is operational. The Rogers / FOCA special pricing plan for internet service is $60 per month this year. (unless you have a Rogers phone in which case it remains $50 per month) Even at the $60 price it is the best internet service for us on the lake. It appears they throttle the 5G connection to 40MBps down, and 10MBps up. That is plenty of bandwidth for any single-family use. On a related subject, Bell seems to have improved their cell signal in the area as I can now make calls indoors. I used to have to sit on the front steps to make or receive voice calls. Now I am showing 4 bars of service indoors.
The dump is on Winter hours. It is open Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday and holiday Mondays from 11AM to 4:30PM.
2026 fishing regulations are not yet posted. If things remain unchanged, lake trout season will open January 1. Bass season should open June 27, 2026 and close November 30. The Limerick chain of lakes has a "slot size" for lake trout that MUST be returned to the lake if caught. It is roughly 16 to 22 inches. It is also a "one line" lake when ice fishing. The Limerick chain of lakes are at the very south end of zone 15.
