SUNFLOWERS, FISHING, AND WELCOME TO OBAMALAND

FIELDS OF SUNFLOWERS NEAR MASON

MILES OF OIL TANKERS ALONG HWY. 63

Thursday.  I am off fishing with neighbor Jon on his charter fishing boat early so post this blog late Wednesday evening.  He just called, saying he could use an extra hand to help with the boat and lines and that sounded great to me as I haven't been fishing on the big lake in over a year.  Hope to get some fish pictures for tomorrow's post.

  We had to take a trip to Spooner, about two hours southwest of Bayfield on Wednesday, and found hundreds of acres of sunflowers growing along Hwy. 63 near Mason.  Beautiful!  And, very interesting, as by late afternoon the flowers, which orient themselves toward the sun during the day, had already turned east, toward Thursday morning's rising sun. It was a cloudy evening, and perhaps that helped trigger their early response.

   Also along Hwy. 63, north of Hayward, we saw several miles of side-tracked railroad tanker cars, all newly painted and refurbished.  Logic and some recently overheard conversations lead me  to believe that these tanker cars will soon be in service to move  much of the oil that is now becoming a glut in Canada because of the Obama Administration's senseless foot dragging on approving the construction of the Keystone Pipeline from Canada to Texas.  The Enbridge oil pipeline from Canada to Duluth, Minnesota, has been upgraded to carry much greater amounts of oil, and if the oil doesn't get to US refineries via the Keystone pipeline it will travel by alternate pipeline routes and rail.  Recent news articles assert that rail transport of oil can be cost competitive with pipelines, and rail transport of oil is certainly far more cost effective than a non-existant  pipeline. Our existing national network of  rail lines and pipelines can carry almost anything almost anywhere in the United States.

   So now we have, in the absence of a very safe and economically feasible transcontinental pipeline, the transportation of oil by rail, which is arguably at least as  hazardous  as an underground pipeline, and with great quantities of Canadian and North Dakota oil now flowing freely into Duluth, you can be sure it will be transported by oceangoing thousand-foot tanker ships through the Great Lakes and the Seaway to world markets as well.  Think Europe, now dependent on oil from a Middle East in its death throes.

   Sorry, folks, but anyone thinking that a commodity as valuable and necessary as oil is not going to be extracted, transported, refined and sold on the world market is just plain naive.  But hey, welcome to Obamaland!