Forest Fire!

We just got back from a wonderful couple of weeks at our cottage in Haliburton, Ontario. Early one evening, Trish and I decided to take our kayaks out and paddle to the end of the lake. We came out of our bay and turned to the south, spending a lovely hour splashing along, paddling into the wind. As we made our way down the lake, pushing through the waves, we were vaguely aware of a float plane doing circuits behind us.

Float planes are a common occurence on our lake. In fact, the family who used to own our cottage have a float plane and they moved across the lake to a deeper anchorage so we see their plane taking off and landing quite often. However, this plane was a fairly large, bright yellow twin otter and it kept on taking off and landing.

When we turned around to paddle back home, we noticed that the twin otter was actually dousing a small forest fire to the north east of our lake. It would swoop in from the east, taxi down the lake to take water into its pontoon tanks, take off and bank over the east shore of the lake and then do a run over the fire where it would empty its tanks over the fire. The plane kept this up seemingly for hours and, sure enough, by the next morning the fire was gone.

Here are pictures of the airplane taking on water, banking and then pouring water on the fire.







The call letters for the plane are C-COGA. It is a twin otter owned by the Ministry of Natural Resources.