SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - The boat launch at Prelude Lake Park is undergoing up to $15,000 in repairs as an independent contractor attempts to breathe new life into the site.

The GNWT has hired longtime Prelude Lake cabin dweller Rick Barry and his daughter Jennifer to repair the docks as well as administer them, with the door open for Barry to rent out boats to park visitors, said Luke Coady, manager of parks and tourism in the North Slave region for the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment.

Aided by family and friends, longtime Prelude Lake cabin dweller Rick Barry is renovating the docks at Prelude Lake Park, with the intention of renting boats at the park eventually. - Guy Quenneville/NNSL photo

The docks, which can accommodate between 22 and 24 boats, were leased out by the GNWT to Norther Lights tour provider Aurora World, which folded last year.

"Essentially, you could say we've inherited it," said Coady, who added the docks were "definitely in rough shape."

"We didn't want them to go away, but we're not really in the business of running docking facilities," he said. "So we put it out to see if there was anyone who could give us a proposal on how to run it and fix it up and get it to a point where the public could have a better opportunity to use them."

In came Barry, a retired former North Slave Correctional Facility officer with time on his hands and a passion for the water.

"I've been on this lake for 31 years and I love this lake," said Barry. "A facility like this is a great benefit. When it's finished, it will be pleasing and nice to look at."

Supervising various friends and family members since April, Barry has doubled the lengths of each slip by 16 feet by adding floaters to allow the users to access deep water at Prelude, where the shore has receded over the years.

"All the boards on the slips were torn off and reboarded," he said. "With the main dock, it was going to be too labour intensive to strip it all off, so we what we did was add two-by-eights to the existing dock (to reinforce it) and reboarded right over top of it."

The docks haven't been renovated since 1990, according to Barry.

"One of the guys went through when they started. The board just broke. There were no injuries or anything."

"They were pretty weathered," said Bruce Davidson, manager of the park, of the docks. "Many people have asked about (them)."

Daryl Dolynny, a former board member with Aurora World, said the company's lease with the GNWT never required it to do maintenance on the docks – just to collect money from boaters using it. But the company often went beyond that, putting some of its own money into "cosmetic" improvements, he added.

More substantial improvements were needed but did not look financially promising in the long term, he added.

"There isn't enough revenue from those docks in order to put the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in infrastructure that that launch really needed," said

Aurora World sent a proposal to the GNWT in 2005 to replace the docks entirely with floating docks. The proposal was refused.

"At the end of the day, (the docks) were a liability; they were never an asset to Aurora World," he said.

Barry, on the other hand, said there's hope for a viable boat rental business, which will be managed by Jennifer.

Regular renters have been contacted to see if they still want to use the dock, with 75 per cent of them saying yes so far, he added.