2024-01-27 11:36:13
“Are you too warm? Just open the window.” Jennifer Gravel doesn’t even wait for an answer, but swings open the small window of the hut. Cutting cold air immediately rushes in, biting into the cheeks that didn’t turn away quickly enough. According to the thermometer, it’s minus 19 degrees outside, it feels like minus 27. That’s why the propane gas stove inside is bubbling at the highest setting – with the window open and next to a hole in the ice where the fishing line disappears. The situation is not without a certain humor. At home they argue again about whether 23 degrees in the living room is an unwritten human right or whether 19 does. Less than a ten hour flight away in Canada, you’ll break out in a sweat while ice fishing.
In winter they are drawn to the water
Gravel had looked a little amused at the thickly hooded figure who knocked on their heated booth on the frozen Fjord du Saguenay that morning. Someone probably didn’t expect that a tradition handed down by indigenous people could be combined with the comforts of modern times. The young woman, a passionate hunter and fisherman, spends several weeks every year on the mighty arm of water that squeezes between steep cliffs a good 200 kilometers north of the provincial capital of Quebec. In places the rocks are as high as the water is deep: 250 meters. The Saguenay is one of the largest fjords in the world, 100 kilometers long and up to three kilometers wide. And the only one in North America whose shores are permanently inhabited. When it temporarily disappears under thick blankets of ice and snow in the winter, which lasts almost six months up here, hundreds of mobile huts are added. From a distance they look like colorful circus or fair floats.
#Winter #Canada #Ice #fishing #Quebec