The inflatable wing, though built for summer, is the game-changing winter cottage toy we’ve all been waiting for
DAN BARTOLI IS A CANADIAN superdude. By day, he is a soft-spoken, mild-mannered electrical engineer who works for a global manufacturing conglomerate. From the company’s outpost in a Peterborough, Ont., industrial park, he designs and builds tiny, mundane machines. “We make instruments that measure volume and level using ultrasound,” he tells me. I had no idea such contraptions existed, but apparently, lots of companies need lots and lots of them, and they’re not cheap. The work has kept him busy, endlessly improving his mousetrap for decades.
But once he clocks out from work, Dan seeks out adventure, attempting feats of derring-do using way cooler gadgets. He is fit and lithe, seemingly without an ounce of body fat, a late-fifties guy with the cut physique of eternal youth. Only the salt-and-pepper hair hints at his years. On this mid-March weekend, we are at his cottage north of Buckhorn, Ont., on the shores of Gold Lake. A snug log cabin hideaway is built atop a massive granite slope, but the little wooden shed down by the lake is where he keeps his gear.
The day is cold but cloudless, and the lake is blanketed by a thick sheet of ice and a cushion of fresh snow. Dan’s wearing mirrored Ray-Bans to filter the bright sunlight bouncing off the white horizon,
