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Paradise islet

The summer solstice was on Tuesday, but this year the official day to celebrate Midsummer is Saturday 25th - or, as the Finnish habit goes, the celebrations take place the night before. My son and his girlfriend are visiting for the weekend. On Friday noon we rowed to the nearby islet. The weather was fine - almost totally calm winds, warm sunshine but not scorchingly hot. It felt like a paradise islet.

We settled on the west end of the islet, where there is kind of a rocky beach and nice sandy lake-bottom. Since the southern part of the islet is bushy and mire-like, the rocky west end is often the nicest and sunniest place to be. One summer, years ago, when my son was still a teenager, he built there a small circle of rocks for safely burning a camp-fire. That fireplace is still there. There was a group of loons swimming around, and little fish splashing near the water foliage. I took a fishing rod and waded in the knee-deep water, casting the lure around. Already the second try caught a common rudd. But, since it isn't considered such a tasty fish, and we had plenty of food packed with us, I released the rudd back into the lake. Later on I caught a small perch, which I kept.

While I was fishing, my son started to re-arrange his old fireplace, and his girlfriend sat under a tree reading a book. The water was already warm enough to comfortably swim, so I went to swim around the islet. When I returned from my round-trip swimming, my son has placed a wide flat stone resting on top of walls of rock. He started to burn fire under the flat stone, which eventually made the stone hot enough to cook food. We grilled sausages and had some drinks - coffee, white wine and lemonade. Coffee was cooked with the lake water, and the other drinks were kept cool underwater, with rocks as weight to keep the bottles in the lake-bottom. It took some time to get the flat rock hot enough - but that kind of a was the whole point. Oh blessed are these unhurried idle days when you feel that you can freely spend a hour or two just to get some sausages grilled. Well, once hot, the flat rock worked pretty well for grilling.

After a couple of hours of relaxing we started to pack our stuff. My son poured a lot of water on the remains of fire, to thoroughly put out all the red glow of ambers. Pouring water on the hot rocks and stones made it hiss and the water evaporated like löyly on sauna stove. That got us talking if it would be possible to have a portable tent-sauna. Basically, to heat up a heap of rocks, and when the fire is out, then have some sort of poles bent over the primitive sauna stove, and a tarp for cover. That should be enough to trap the hot steam inside the tent made of tarp. A construction like that would allow one to have a wilderness sauna nearly anywhere. I know people have been doing things like that, and Finnish military has a bit more modernized version based on the same idea. Well, but since we didn't have any tarp with us, we rowed back home, enjoying the warm sunny weather.

Calm winds - easy weather for rowing
Calm winds - easy weather for rowing
Cooking on a heated rock
Cooking on a heated rock
Relaxing
Relaxing
A panomara view over the lake
A panomara view over the lake
tags: 
diary
homesteading
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