Along the southern shore of Lake Varda, the end of the boating season is measured less by a calendar than by the number of empty slips.

By the end of this week, most of the smaller fishing and family boats will be out of the water.

The work happens every year: engines drained, hulls checked, nets repaired, dock boards replaced where another season of ice and wake has loosened them.

At one small cooperative landing, three generations of the same families spent Thursday pulling boats onto wheeled cradles while children carried coiled rope into a storage shed.

Nobody there was discussing Convention procedure.

They were discussing cracked paint, an unreliable winch and whether the lake would freeze early.

One resident said her family had used the same stretch of shore for longer than anyone living could remember.

"We have people inland now," she said. "People move. Families spread out. But this is still where everybody comes back."

For several Indigenous families in the southern lake districts, that relationship reaches beyond recreation or commercial fishing. Community gatherings, seasonal food practices and family histories remain tied to particular stretches of the shoreline and to travel across the lake.

Those connections are ordinary enough locally that residents rarely describe them as political.

The Convention has made them harder to ignore.

The certified corridor petition included communities north and south along Lake Varda. The canceled referendum never occurred, and the Convention has not proposed a replacement boundary.

Residents interviewed this week were divided on what should happen.

Some said the original corridor should be allowed to make the choice it qualified to make. Others said any arrangement that left the remainder of Korda without meaningful access to Lake Varda would be impossible to accept.

Most were considerably more interested in finishing the boats before the weather changed.

Near sunset, the last one pulled from the water Thursday belonged to an older couple whose grandchildren had been sent ahead with the life jackets.

The husband checked the tie-down straps twice.

His wife watched the lake.

"We argue about who governs what," she said. "The lake was here before all of us."

Then they drove the boat home.