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	March 20th through 22nd, 2009

The first thing we noticed after stepping out of the car on Friday was the grass. You can see it! It needs cutting! The snow is clearly in retreat.

The sap shack was in full burn all weekend.

The auxiliary cooker was also pressed into service to prevent backed up sap from rotting.

Bar night, in the still waterless bar, featured mostly beer and pool. There was talk of shots and flaming shots but none were made. Maybe next weekend. There were also monkeys.

Late Saturday morning, it was time to load the ATV and trailer with jugs to be filled with fresh tree squeezings.

After hiking to the trees, we were given 2 jugs and a funnel and pointed to the trees.

Most of the trees had produced less than a gallon, but some had dripped well over 2 gallons of sap. Carrying 2 five gallon jugs (about 50 pounds each) back to the ATV got old fast and the one jug at a time method was quickly employed.

Later on Saturday, smoke from the cookers hung in the air on the north end of the lake as the 110 gallons of sap collected was reduced down to syrup.

Both cookers were fired until midnight.

Both cookers were fired back up Sunday morning.

There was quite a way to go to boil down to syrup. I was told that the first batch is to be canned mid-week.

Checking the ice thickness was not an easy task. There was no snow on the surface and it was really, really slippery.

There is about 19.5 inches of very good ice. That's down 3 inches from last Sunday. Ice-out will be early this year.

Knottlane is in better shape than last weekend.

With the predicted warmer weather, watch for open water along the edges later this week. Also watch for significant dock damage if the large mass of ice starts moving. Hope your dock is on the up wind side of the weather.<br><br><br>-Nemo

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