Paul Charko died in late 2003, but right to the end, he and Anne were always the Saskatoon Sailing Club's best friends. In the club's pioneering days at Redberry

“Paul Charko was always there to help us. If it was raining he would pull us out of the mud with his tractor. If we needed tools or anything fixed, he was there," Charter member, Jim Smith recalls.

A close relationship with the sailing club and the Charkos began in 1963 when the club was just getting established with it’s new site on Redberry.

When I was gathering information on the History of the lake, I visited with Paul and Anne Charko. Paul recalled the very beginning of the club’s Redberry location. “ I remember the first time when John Hall came up to my farm. First of all we got acquainted with him and he was asking me if I could suggest a piece of land someplace around the lake that they could settle.” Paul’s suggestion was the one chosen by the club.

As hard as it may be to imagine, there was a very limited space for boats and cabin trailers on club land. Anne recalls that was the case in the first year or two. “ There were seasons when we had our yard full of sailboats, trailers and so on.”

Paul’s cousin, Johnny Charko farmed quarter section of land close to the lake just east of the “point”. A third of one quarter section was underwater....and the shore at that point was the location of the great beach which Anne Procenty recalls in her article (which follows this one).

Paul Charko, was the third generation Charko on the 3 quarters of a section close to the sailing club. His father William, at just 13 years of age, had emigrated to Canada in 1907 with William’s father George Charko.

Paul began farming on 3 quarter sections with his father when he was 24 and he especially remembers 1937, on of his first years on the farm, when the drought was so severe that he was forced to seek some temporary employment helping with harvesting near Aylsham.

The water was high when Paul’s father located on his farm ....a fact he often recalled.

This is backed up by this government survey map of 1919 which shows a waterline almost identical to an earlier survey of 1906.

For a long period of time, lake water washed against the shore below the present day site of the clubhouse and eroded a sharp “cliff” between our high and low roads. The water was so high in that period that it surrounded a small piece of land where the clubhouse sits...and the “point” peninsula did not exist. The lake’s shore extended east beyond the intersection of the low road to Krydor and the road to the club. “I would say it would be about 1924 or 25 where the lake started showing a little bit...going off from the shores.” Paul recalled the water level of Redberry still remaining quite high until 1937 when the drought seemed to finally take it’s toll on lake water. “After 1937 it just kept going down down down....and it never stopped.”

Paul remembered clearly how, in the winter, the frozen lake was used to haul grain to Krydor. A group of 10 to 15 farmers would form a caravan of sleighs as they helped each other take loads which were unloaded by hand at the destination. Each farmer had his own trail to the main winter road which ran north and south near the middle of Redberry. But the trips on the ice were not without risks. “Ice cracks were sometimes big. Theres an incident where my uncle’s pair of horses got drowned in a crack. Didn’t expect it it...it was kind of dark.” There were also drownings casualties among the men including Andrew Milleck, one of Paul’s friends.

Some also died attempting to reach whitefish netting sites when their vehicles broke through the ice.

Paul and Anne remembered that the lake could be unforgiving even in the summer. On Aug 13, 1952, three C-45 Expeditor aircraft from Advanced Flying Training base at RCAF Stn Saskatoon were on low level flight training over Redberry Lake. The low level passes were taking place just south of the point from where we can now see the bible camp. In the early 1950s that land was a small island. Each aircraft carried an instructor and two recently graduated pilots who were learning to fly twin-engined aircraft. Anne Charko was an eye witness to what happened next.

“I was outside. One of the planes touched the water once, went up again, flew for a little while, then hit the water and started sinking. I saw the whole thing. Paul’s mother got so excited and yelled for us to get some ropes.”

The Charkos drove to the lake but by the time they arrived the plane had disappeared beneath the surface. The instructor and a trainee pilot were drowned. The second trainee pilot elected to swim to the island and was rescued from a sandbar.

Investigators needed to recover the aircraft but it was not an easy task. However the Charkos were able to point out the correct spot to within about 20 feet of the crash. Paul estimates it to be about 1/4 mile south of the point.

The aircraft was brought to the surface and hauled up onto the beach,

loaded onto a trailer and sent by rail from Krydor.

There was another, much happier airplane event which occurred very close to the club back in the summer of 1941 when a Cessna Crane twin engine plane landed on Paul Charko’s land near the intersection of the club road and the low road to Krydor.

Canada was the country chosen to train pilots from Australia, New Zealand, England and Canada during WW2 under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Here in Saskatchewan, an RAF flight crew had been training in the Redberry area using the twin-engine trainer, the Cessna Crane. Then one day life along the eastern shore of Redberry became very exciting for the Charkos and for their neighbors, the Procentys.

Anne procenty who lived in the small house near the gates to the present day SSC, her 2 sisters and some neighbors were in their yard when all the excitement began.

“ We were just on the farm and going for a walk or something........the plane would go so low, we’d wave...for months they were doing that, training along Redberry and then one day they landed .........

and we all came running and they took a picture of us. They wanted to see who was waving to them, I guess” Anne added that they were actually a bit nervous, afraid they had done something wrong by landing on someone’s land causing some sizable ruts in the soft cultivated field. Paul Charko recalls the plane being on the ground for perhaps an hour before taking off without incident.

The Charkos resided in Blaine Lake for about 12 years before Pauls death, after moving there in 1990 from their 3 quarter sections of land overlooking Redberry lake.

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