President’s Message
Ah, well, you will have to join him on his vacation to receive this month’s words of wisdom.
Fishing Report
by James Santora
This has been a very good winter batch of fish in our fish pens so far. I have not lost one fish that I know of. Don Davis who lives on the west end of the lake is also raising fish. He is raising twenty five thousand Silvers. He is also having good success. Please remember that fishing season opens on March 1 2008 and please be very careful as the ice might be very rotten. Please check the regulations for the changes for this year. Please catch as many Mackinaw as legally possible so we can get our good Silver fishing back.
LAKE LEVEL EDUCATION
at our April Board Meeting
Why does the lake level seem low? What conditions impact the levels of the lake? Can anything be done to hold water longer? What would it take to control the level? Do you have any questions you would like to ask an expert about the hydraulics of Deer Lake? Our April 10th board meeting will be your chance to address these questions and ask some of your own. Ken Merrill from the DOE will give a presentation. It would be helpful to have some of your specific questions in advance. Please e-mail them to: skipper (at) webband.com.
Board Meeting Time Change
Since many of the board members roll in from Spokane, the 7Pm starting time has made it difficult to get back home at a reasonable time. Starting in March, we will have our board meetings at 6pm from now on. This does NOT give potential windbags a license to huff and puff more than usual. We would like to be home snug in our beds by 9PM. (Early to bed and all that jazz.) Meetings (with cookies) continue to be held at the Salvation Army Camp dining room.
EMERGENCY SERVICES
By Gerry Block
Greetings from sunny Tucson, Arizona. The local TV station showed a video of the blizzard conditions, snow hazards of winter driving, moose rescue and everything else associated with this years Spokane winter weather. Be safe!
The fishing season will open on March 1, 2008. This is an early start to the season and I know that there will be several fishing folks out on Deer Lake. This early date, approximately six weeks before the actual ice melt off from the lake, is cause for concern. I have some great safety tips, from several Internet sites, to share with you. The “tips” are for everyone who enjoy the frozen lake. Snowmobile/4wheel riders, walkers, and skaters are included.
The first rule of thumb for ice activity is to think safe ice. Keep this in mind as the weather changes from a hard freeze to melting conditions. The “honeycomb/pocket” formations will cause a weakness in the strength of the ice. Deer Lake is a spring fed lake and will freeze at a slower rate, than other bodies of water. The heavy snow insulates the ice and may give you a false sense of security, for your particular activity. All of the articles recommend using a buddy system for safety. This is very smart thinking! Just remember that the weight of several snowmobiles/4wheelers parked close to each other changes the safety guidelines and the amount of the thickness recommended for safe ice. A good/safe ice measurement for one snowmobile is 7.5 inches.
One method of measuring the depth of the ice is to use a spud bar. This is a long metal or wooden pole with a metal tip, that may be used as a walking stick. While testing the ice depth, wear ice creepers. It doesn’t matter if you wear golf shoes or the strap on cleats, a safe footing is always smart.
Should someone fall in, stay as calm as possible and call 911! Hypothermia at Deer Lake wouldn’t take long at all. Start calling “fire”, that gets everyone’s attention. If you happen to be the unfortunate one to fall into the lake, find the original hole, go to the side of the hole from where you came from. This will be the stronger ice. Fold your arms onto the ice and start kicking. This may be enough motion to propel you up and out of the water. If you do exit the water, roll or crawl towards your buddy. Hopefully by this time the neighbors are aware of the accident and want to help. Think hypothermia! Warm blankets, a sled or small aluminum boat for a quicker transport off of the ice, and again think ice safety. If we are unable to get out of the water and folks are responding to the accident, our buddy will shout “single file”. Remember the weight distribution on ice. This is probably going to frustrate some, but rather one incident and one victim, than many.
The rescuers will need to spread out and crawl or use a sled/toboggan (prone position) to get to the scene. Hopefully the neighbors will have remembered their PFDs, a 50 foot rope and a floatation device. An empty plastic gallon milk jug tied to the 50ft rope will help.
There are many more safety measures on the Internet. Do a Google search for ice fishing safety and be safe this season.
Pancake Breakfast
Spread the word! The annual DLPOA pancake breakfast is scheduled for July 6, 2008. Set up will be at 10:00 on Saturday, July 5th. Lee Bayly is in charge. Lee's home phone number is 326-0954.
Membership
by the Newsletter Guy
You will observe tucked into this issue the ubiquitous begging envelope. Putting out this rag sheet cost some small amount of bread, and making the big bang bangs on the 4th of July requires several loaves. And then there is insurance on our property, Dock Demo Days backhoe rentals, etc etc. For a full blow by blow accounting of where the nickels went, come to the annual meeting and listen to our treasurer’s report.
In the past, and in fact, in the future, we will insert these envelopes on purpose into the first two issues of the year. (Last time we screwed up and put one into the last issue of the year too. My bad.) People send us gentle emails to the effect of why in blazes do we keep sending people envelopes when they have already tossed their coins into the dish. Well, it has to do with – we don’t really know what we are doing, basically.
I am the newsletter guy. I put together all these pearls of prose (generally written by somebody else), make it sort of fit on the pages, and hand it off to Walt’s Mailing Service with my Excel spreadsheet (well, actually it is an Access database, but you get the idea) of everybody that is supposed to get one of these things. They print, and they stuff, and they send, and you get.
Mr Egan is our Treasurer. He gets the cash, the coin, the checks, the script, the IOUs, the wooden nickels, and puts it into our unnumbered Swiss bank account, and once in a while pays a bill or three. And he keeps a list of who was nice, and who was naughty. I don’t get that list, and even if I did, Walts don’t get that list, and even if they did, they would not know what to do with it. That is, when they get into newsletter stuffing mode, they huff and they puff and they stuff and while they don’t blow any houses down, everybody gets an envelope, whether they need one or not.
Could we fix this? Probably. Are we gonna fix this? Maybe someday. For now, it is easier to chop down a few extra trees, and in some cases, get people to double dip, rather than to deal with all the paperwork and procedures that would be involved in doing it right.
By the way, if you did double dip, we know who you are, and we will credit you for the next year’s dues. Which, by the way, have gone up to Twenty Bucks, a Double Sawbuck, one green and red Andy Jackson, starting this year. This was voted in at the annual meeting last year. See www.dlpoa.com/AR2007.htm (Case sensitive).
So how can we be so fumbled up, and now charge extra dues for it? See the next page.
Where did all the Money Go?
Well, I can’t answer for all of it (see Mr Egan, ibid) but you should know about some of it.
At the last plus one annual meeting, it was pointed out that an organization of our size needs D&O insurance. This is a CYA policy for the board of directors. It was brought up to the assembled multitude at the last annual meeting, a vote was taken, and we agreed to bump the dues by a five spot to pay for this new benny.
Our president, Larry Nokes, did his due diligence thing, and shopped around for such insurance. We had been told before hand that it would run in the neighborhood of $1500/year. That was, as they say in the computer biz, the demo version. When he went with check in hand, they said, well yeah, the D&O is $1500, but first you gotta insure your property for liability.
So what property is that, you may ask? 20 acres of swampland, mostly – the land at the head of the narrows is ours, all ours, and up till now we have never insured it against some idiot rowing his inner tube into the reeds and getting stuck or drinking algae or any of dozens of other potential liability things that seem to happen these days – see Hot Chocolate in Lap court cases as an example. OK sez Larry, how much is that? $2500, they said as they cackled in their greedy glee. And that is On Top Of the D&O bill.
Ouch, sez Larry, I gotta check back with you. He came to the next board meeting, brought this item up, and when the board recovered from their coughing fit, they decided that if this was to be part of the expense of getting the D&O, then we would have to eat it.
By now we should all be able to sleep like a bug in a rug, knowing that all our legal problems are behind us. However, that $2500 is a huge chunk of our annual budget. This problem needs to be discussed at the next annual meeting. Those of you that are following our board meeting discussions on our web page (www.dlpoa.com/boardnotes.htm) will see where this might be heading.
Speaking of which:
The Web Site
by The Web Guy
The board notes for the last two years or so have been posted on our site one meeting late. This was because something happened in the distant past, and a bad board note or something got published before the board blessed it at the next meeting. We have as of the February meeting changed that policy. Now the board notes are published on our web site as soon as the Web Guy (moi) gets around to talking to the board Secretary guy (also moi, temporarily) who took the notes for the meeting. (And eventually some of it gets into the newsletter by the Newsletter Guy, coincidentally also moi).
It needs to be noted that these notes, which will have a bright Red background, are not yet blessed and reviewed by the board, they are quite unofficial, and therefore please do not throw rocks or even soft vegetables at the board members (and especially the Secretary, newsletter or web guys) about the content of the minutes until after the next meeting. Pointing out errors in the minutes, though, is most acceptable.
Frank Buell, Pioneer
We have come across a document written by one Frank Buell in 1983 about his life on Deer Lake before the 1920's. Some of us probably did not think that anybody at all lived here at that time, but apparently there are several people now on our lake who have lived here for 80+ years.
This document is 15 pages long. Most of it is very interesting reading. We will be putting the entire document on our web site as a PDF download. For now, here are some excerpts:
I’m going to record some events that occurred in my life when I was a young man and boy at Deer Lake, Washington. For your information, I’m 73 years of age (in 1983), in good health and weigh 162 to 164 pounds. I’m five feet, nine and a half inches tall. My hair is white and inclined to be curly like those of my mother and father’s families.
I spent a most enjoyable boyhood at Deer Lake, Washington, and have many fond and thrilling
memories of my early days there. My father was a vice president of the Great Northern Railroad
and was in charge of their real estate holdings from Cutbank, Montana, originally, to west of
Spokane. In among the properties that the Great Northern Railroad acquired was property on Deer Lake which extended about 2 1/2 to 3 miles along the west side and the north shore. This was by far the most beautiful and spectacular part of Deer Lake. The land was very level, had beautiful native trees on it. The property from the lake’s edge to the back property line was at least a quarter to a half mile deep particularly on the west side.
The only building, at that time, on any of the property was a beautiful log lodge practically in the middle of what is now Sunrise Point. It was very park like even in those days! It had no brush and there was nothing but native trees on it.
In 1914 I was four years old and I recall we came on the train as far as Loon Lake and stopped at the livery stable there and got a "dray", as my father called it, and drove out to Deer Lake to take a look at the property. The road was very poor, full of rocks and it was a very bumpy trip. The lake not only fascinated me, but also fascinated my mother, who just fell in love with the area. The log lodge was spectacular, to say the least. I can recall it was furnished with wooden tables and chairs in much the western style.
Even in those early days they had three or four wooden boats. Wide scow type things, not the kind of. rowboat we see today. 1 recall one summer two of these boats sank out in front of Sunrise Point. When we were about 12,- 13 years of age--or maybe 14-- some of the boys could see them sitting there on the bottom. We hooked onto them with hooks and pulled them out of the water and dumped out the dirt and garbage that was in them. They’d been sunk by people, from across the lake, who were getting sand for their beaches. There were numerous spots where sand collected in the lake. The boats had sunk when a storm came up and they had too much sand in them. In any event, where cabin 17 now is, at Sunrise Point, my parents put up our first tent house.
~~~
Coming Events
Board Meeting -- Thurs Mar 13 -- Note -- New time of 6PM
Board Meeting -- Thurs Apr 10
Board Meeting -- Thurs May 8
Spring Cleanup -- Sat May 17
Dock Demo Day -- Sat June 7
Annual Meeting -- Sat June 14 (firestation)
Fireworks -- Thurs Night July 3
Parade and stuff -- Fri July 4
Pancake Breakfast – Sun July 6
Fall Cleanup -- Sat Sept 20
For a list of board members and their assignments, please see our web site at www.dlpoa.com/officers
This newsletter put together by Dennis DeMattia 926-8848 demattia(at)acm.org
Deer Lake Property Owners Association
Box 250
Loon Lake, Wa 99148-0250