Ice

As you can see from the view from our cabin's front window above, ice has choked the shoreline in front of our cabin and for miles and miles to the west and east for the last few days. We'd never anticipated seeing ice on Lake Superior as late as the Memorial Day weekend, but now they're saying it will linger into June and in some places even into July.

Winds and currents have caused the lingering floes to collect in several places along the southern shore of the lake, according to the two-day-old map below. They're pretty, but they're affecting boaters and fishermen whose craft aren't sturdy enough to shoulder their way between bergs. We hear that in Bayfield, Wisconsin, off the Apostle Islands, the harbor is so choked with ice that the ferry to Madeline Island is having a hard time, and both commercial fishing craft and pleasure boats are remaining ashore. As a consequence, Bayfield is all but deserted on what should be the opening weekend of the tourist season.

I've thought that maybe in a future novel Steve Martinez could chase a bad guy through ice floes in the sheriff's Boston Whaler on Memorial Day. But would anybody believe that?

Spy in the sky

This morning I took my Phantom drone for another drive in our backyard, this time with the GoPro camera set to take a photograph every 10 seconds. Here is an example. (Click on the photo for a larger version.)

There was a little wind, but if I took my hands off the two joysticks on the controller, the drone would hover in the same place and at the same altitude, thanks to the GPS inside it. Cool.

Notice the ice in Lake Superior in the background. Hard to believe it's still around on Memorial Day weekend.

Drones

The other day I flew my new drone for the first time. It was a success, although I did manage to fly the thing into a tree and then the woodpile, scuffing up the propellers in the process. No squirrels or chickadees, however, were harmed.

The machine is a DJI Phantom, one of the most popular hobbyist Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The Phantom is a radio-controlled quadricopter (a k a quadcopter) with four propellers that carries a GoPro sports-action camera. With it one can take photographs or videos of things on the ground.

Naturally some folks of a leftist bent get upset at the mention of the word "drone," because they bring to mind the U.S. assassination of al-Qaeda and the accompanying deaths of innocent civilians in the Islamic world. Others who embrace rightist views think of drones as black-helicopter government spies in the sky.

But drones are also useful tools for civilian search-and-rescue and law enforcement operations. They can do most anything a helicopter can do, and at much less cost. In my novel-in-progress, Tracking the Beast, Sheriff Steve Martinez employs a drone the size of a garbage can lid to search a vast area in a criminal case, and I bought the Phantom for research purposes.

And for fun, too. It helps make up for having to give up flying my airplane five years ago after a heart attack and triple bypass. (Flying a hobbyist drone is also a lot cheaper than owning a 50-year-old lightplane.)

Here's a Phantom:

So far I've flown the drone only in the tree-shrouded backyard of our Lake Superior cabin, but soon I plan to go to the Porcupine County airport, where a portion of the field is set aside for radio-controlled model flying.

More later.