I went through the log book and did a count on how much syrup we actually made, 130 Litres is my count. I think it is right on the money. 

We had quite the sound track this year as well. The sat radio came in handy. The 40′s 50′s 60′s 70′s and even the 80′s were some of  finger snapping melodies we were groving to. If singing to syrup as it boils makes it taste better then we should have the best. The firewood music was supplied by a fellow islander that I used to work with at Thompson’s Maple products, the band is called The BREAKMEN. A real treat and fast becoming favorite of mine. You can check them out at http://www.thebreakmen.com/ They are a folk/Blue grass group. Great music to keep the spirit up while slaving away at the mundane task of firewood.

For our first year we had a few minor problems with getting to know how everything is going to run. Most problems were due to being distracted by the thousand things going on around us. The vacuum pump flooded a few times, over filling the gravity tank was always a fun one when Dave was sitting beneath it, or flooding the pan over the float box,  and my favorite, forgetting to close the valve on the sap storage tank and getting excited watching the extractor pump over several times before realizing it haha. Oh well we needed to learn the hard way on some things I guess.

Dave and I would like to thank all of our friends and family that helped and supported us in this endeavor.  We couldn’t have done it with out you. Especially our Moms who couldn’t stand the thought of us starving ourselves, and brought wonderful meals on wheels.

Well in closing I must say I miss it already and can’t wait for next year, and I know Dave feels the same.  We plan on a few upgrades to the setup so stay tuned for some updates on our progress.

The memories layed down this year will last a life time.

Cheerio

Mike

We started up the evaporator on Friday night. The pan that we are using is a deep flat pan, not a flue pan. Because I had the most experience with the evaporating I was the first to fire it up.  I decided to run the pan with a 1/4” of liquid in it to start, needless to say I burnt the pan pretty bad and pretty quick.

That was not the only problem we had with the evaporator. We also are trying to fuel it with Bass wood. It was pretty damp and really did not burn all that well, because of this we have renamed it Ass wood.

Steam is also one of the big problems that we had to overcome. Our custom hood worked pretty good at channeling the steam but the real problem came from not having it at the right angle. It was blowing steam right into the faces of the operator rather than to the back of the pan an out of the shack. The hood also did not really come down far enough so we draped towels over it to keep the stream contained. We have it dialed in pretty good now.

More to come on how the bush is running and what happened over the weekend.

As for sap there is a ton of it. I thought I was going to completely miss the season turns out it is going to be running for a few more weeks to come, at least that is what the word is. Everyone is still making light and some medium, yesterday’s boil was no different.

I was able to take a tour of a few other operations on the Island, one was Stadnick’s and the other was Chess Wallace’s. Chess is one of the old timers who has seen it all, It was quite amazing to check out the old operation. He is running a diesel powered steam boiler. The steam is heated up and pumped though tubes at 100 psi these tubes than go into a the boiling pan to heat the sap. His vacuum system runs at about 20-25 psi which is much higher than Bill’s bush(13-15). He also has a reverse osmosis machine that gets the sugar content up to about 10% which makes boiling off a lot easier. It is a really slick looking operation.

Today I spend most of the day helping out at the maple syrup festival at the legion hall. My mother is one of the board members at the Children’s Library so she was selling all sorts of things for fundraising. That place was insanely busy, line ups out the door.

I am going to be heading out to the sugar bush for the last time this season in the afternoon. I am really going to miss it here but I will be back next year. This is going to be the last post that I have to deal with this stupid dial up internet but it is also going to be the last one from the island. I can’t wait until next year.

It has been a pretty good year so far, we are boiling every day. The funny thing is we keep making light syrup. I think we had one batch of medium and the rest has been light and extra light. This could mean that we are in for a very long season. The trees do what they want I guess.

Yesterday we tapped in 108 trees, this brings the grand total up to 1753, pretty close to a full bush for Bill. At the end of the day I went over to Bill and Ann’s for a barBQ, it was amazing.

We had a lot of help today from a few people that came into the bush.  Most of the day, like every other day was spend splitting firewood and boiling, all day. Some good new is that the quad is fixed, turns out it was the combination of a weak battery and bad gas, thank you Esquire Honda for helping me out.

Today was one of those days you just love what is happening outside. It was really warm during the day and started to freeze when it got dark. We had a great run and were making maple syrup all day. I also had a chance to take some really cool night shots of the sugar bush. The full moon was amazing and lit up everything.

I am going to keep this post brief as I have to get to bed and start the whole thing over tomorrow morning bight and early. Seeing the Island a buzz in maple syrup time makes me want to get my own sugarbush someday. I am going to have to crunch some numbers and see if it is possible. It would be nice to be able to live for a whole year off nothing but maple syrup.

first of all here is the video that I shot of Bill cutting the huge block of wood.

and now here is what has been happening over the past few days:

Day 3
The day after my last post, April 4th we were out at the sugar bush until about 10:00 p.m.. We tied in a spur line and tapped about 80 more trees. Steph and Mike came by the sugar shack at about 7:00 p.m. and stayed until the sap ran out. They were very welcome as they brought beer, like I said they are very good friends. I also met a great guy named Cody who helped to fire the boiler and watched the temperature gauge. Than after syrup was done we went out to Mike’s hunting camp and stayed up way to late. I wanted to be in the bush that day but no dice.

Day 4
Since most of the people in the camp did not get up until about 3:00 p.m. I thought that there was no point in going into the bush that day. We had a lot of fun anyway playing with Mike bombardier trail groomer. We also did some very useless building of dams in his creek and played with the deer in his yard. All this while the largest run yet this season took over Bill and the sugar bush. Thank goodness we had the emergency tank to fill otherwise Bill would have lost even more sap than he did.

A completed project

Day 5
Mike gave me a ride out to the Bill’s sugar bush at about 10:30 a.m.. Mike has worked in a number of sugar bushes so we went to see one of the larger operations on the island, Thompson’s sugar bush. This is a truly a first class set up! The boiler they use is out of an old steam ship. The whole bush is put together in a double line system and he has two beautiful R.O. machines. There are all sorts of really cool little curiosities in his operation enough to write a whole post on.
We stayed out at the bush until about 1:00 am trying to get rid of all the sap that had accumulated from the day before. Once again the big problem was fire wood, we just did not have enough! We ended up burning some green stuff at the beginning of the day to see how it would go, it was bad. We were basically splining wood and throwing it directly in to the fire, never really getting ahead. It is very disheartening to be splitting wood for 8h straight and not even having pile to show for it.
Towards the end of the night we decided to clean up the yard a bit and through the wood-splitter chips into to coals near the end of the boil. This worked better than expected as it kept the fire going longer than we anticipated and we were running low on sap. In the end the problem was the not the amount of sap but rather the flow, as it was getting pretty late at this point the lines from the holding tank to the boiler froze, which stopped the flow of sap.
Luckily we were able to kill the rest of the fire and threw a couple of buckets of cold water in the boiler for good measure. We were both very very tired and trying to finish up all the little chores that had to be done before we left. Just than it happened.
The brand new 4 wheeler that only had 14 km on it would not start. This thing was less then 3 months old and we had been babying ever since it arrived in the bush. We just pushed it out of sight, locked up the camp and went home.

Day 6 – Today

Well since it was a really late night last night we got started a little later today. Everything was frozen and the sap is not running so it was a good day to finish up some chores. Bill had to go into the Sault today which gave us an opportunity get the bring the quad back to the dealership. That machine has been a god sent for us and has already shown it worth in the few days that we have used it. I am no very pleased that it BROKE before it even hit 50km. I hope Esquire Honda treats us right, I though you bought new stuff so that this would not happen?
So Bill got some of the syrup ready to drop off in the Sault, I cleaned up the Archway and the large holding tank and we tried all the trouble shooting we could to get the quad fixed. We still had a very big problem, fire wood! We ended up going out to the bush and cutting down a nice piece of dead standing. Bill fell the tree perfectly, though he almost cut the wrong one down which was already tapped in (that would have been a mess). We got just over a cored of fire wood which might last us a few hours but every little bit helps.
Now Bill is suppose to be in the Sault at about 3:00 to meet up with his girlfriend but of course we get stuck in the bush with the load of wood on it. When we finally get out it is about 2:20 p.m., not enough time to make it the 55 km to the Sault from the sugar bush. We loaded up the the quad as fast as we could, grabbed the syrup that he had to sell and headed out of the bush at top speed. Needless to say I forgot a few items in the  bush mainly the video camera and my jacket so there is no way to get back until tomorrow.

So that is what has been happening over the past few days, thing are more reactionary rather than preparation. The good new is we are making syrup and I think that is all that really matters.

Well it’s day two and what a change in the weather. Yesterday it was 8˚C and sunny today well rain and freezing rain. Needless to say we were not in the bush for very long today. We were out of there at about 11:30, putting in a good 4h or so.

It was the first time that we had a chance to really try out the new 4 wheeler. It was a dream, the road into the bush was so bad that the truck could not make it in. Thankfully we had the “quad” as I like to call it and we were able to traverse the deadly path which many a truck has been lost in, saving us about 1h of walking.

Bill has completely redone his bush setting up something called a double line system. I’ll go in to greater detail later but basicity you run to sets of main lines. The top line collects the gases and keeps the vacuum constant. The bottom line pulls in all your your sap.

I don’t know how long this connection is going to last so I am going to upload a few pictures from yesterday. Tomorrow is going to be a really, really early one as we have to make up for lost time yesterday. It is going to be an early night and that just fine for me.

The double line system which separates gas and sap to keep vacuum constant.

The flight back was fine, they said it was going to be bad and it was not, good surprise Air Canada. Also the baby next to me did not cry a bit, Good deal.

So after doing all sorts of chores in the Sault I went out to the sugar bush to meet up with Bill, he has made some amazing improvements.

He put in this system that I am going to have to go into greater detail about later. I will just say that he was able to replace his whole vacuum tank system and it’s one of the simplest most amazing devices that I have ever seen.

We put up some main line today which gave us another 50-60 taps that would have just ran onto the ground. So far there is about 1450 taps, we are shooting for 2000. We also made about 60L of syrup today. I think the big run is still to come. The biggest Problem today was fire wood, or the lack there of. Because of the downturn in the market no one here is logging. No logging means the people who move logs and get paid in fire wood are not getting paid in fire wood. No one around here would be doing firewood for homes at this time because it is the end of winter.  Well without getting into more detail about the economics of firewood it is easier to say that there is no fire wood and we have no time to cut anymore.

Here are some stills from a video that I shot today cutting a huge block in half because of the urgency in getting enough fire wood. I will post the video later but I have to get to bed, todays shift was for 6:30am – 10:30pm and there is another one tomorrow.

I love this! One hell of a first day.

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http://twitter.com/eryx