Epoxy

Lac Blaskie

Otter Lake, Quebec, Canada

Also known as Otter Lake, Pontiac, Outaouais, Leslie-Clapham-et-Huddersfield

Until 2003 this municipality was called Leslie-Clapham-et-Huddersfield.

Three English township names joined by a French conjunction, which is a fair summary of the Pontiac. Huddersfield was laid out in 1793 and named for the town in West Yorkshire. Leslie came in 1866, named for a Canadian senator. The townships were amalgamated in 1877 and the whole thing became Otter Lake only in 2003.

The Pontiac is one of the few parts of Quebec with an anglophone majority. At the 2021 census, 580 people here gave English as their mother tongue and 400 gave French. The pattern goes back to Scottish Loyalists granted land in the 1780s and Irish families arriving after the famine.

The ground was poor for farming, so the economy was timber instead. Philemon Wright, who started the Ottawa valley logging trade, ran a wood depot at Otter Lake. The mills are gone now.

Details

Feature: Lake
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Cherry
Colour: Forest Green
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: July 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

How this one was made

Walnut, inset, with a black border groove running the full perimeter.

Green rather than blue on this one. Green sits closer to walnut in tone than blue does, so there is less separation between the pour and the wood, and any staining at the shoreline shows more readily. The seal has to hold cleanly all the way round.

Lac Blaskie is a single rounded body with no arms and no islands, which makes it the simplest dam run in this batch. One continuous line about half an inch out from the shore, no branches, no necks, nothing to double back on. The work here is in the consistency rather than the complexity. On a long unbroken curve any wobble in the dam line reads across the whole shape, where on a branching lake the eye is busy elsewhere.

Two colours, the water and the black. The black does the border, the lettering, the compass rose and the small house marker.