Camping 2008 Part 2

Sorry for the delay. Seems even when I'm just copying and pasting someone else's work I still can't update this in a timely manner. Oh well, here's the 2nd installment of the '08 journal.


9-1-08. Monday.
To celebrate Labor Day, we had hot cocoa and pancakes for breakfast. It is so much faster when using the stove and the first cakes don’t turn out with a black hide on them. It was so warm that we slept with both ends of the tent open last night. With the new angle of the tent, the sun sets out the back and rises in the front. Now that is a dream house. I had a very restless night sleeping on the uneven ground. Getting enough restful sleep is a real trick.

The sun was hot but it was tolerable once we got in the wind. There were whitecaps all day, so that worked well for us. Alpha was the first stop of the trip. There was a new law that did not allow leaches and all hooks had to be barbless. Bending the existing barbs was allowed. Leaches were always the sure fire thing for all these years, so we were feeling very anxious without them. We brought a wide variety of Berkley Gulp to have scent on the hook and hoped for the best.

We got a few Walleye and smallies but not the fast action we looked forward to for the last 50 weeks. I did get a 19” smallie and Jarod got a 28” walleye. The slow action was the same on Beta and the south point to Fillet Island. Jarod hooked a sinker to his Rapala Fat Rap and worked it on the bottom. It did as well as jigging at several times. Adapt and survive. Later in the day Jarod also got a 28” pike.

We noticed right away that we were loosing hookups. This never happened in previous years. As much as we told ourselves that it wasn’t the barbless hooks, by the time the trip was over, we were sure of it. Even thought the TV commercials would never lie, we saw right away that the Gulp was no match for live leaches. We never did get into action as fast as previous years. If these two new rules were to slow down the fish catching, it was a big success.

In the morning one canoe came from the Wawiag and crossed over into McVicor bay. In the afternoon a canoe came from the south and crossed into a camp north of us. It may have been the same canoe. We had lunch on the cliff but moved into the shade rather than sit out in the sun. Without the wind, it was way too hot to enjoy sunbathing today. We came in early to cool off and planned on going out after supper when the sun and wind settled down. I washed my head, took a standing bath, and then just sat with my feet in the water to get my core temperature down where I felt comfortable.

A gull found our entrails and would follow us for the rest of the week. Alpha gave us nothing at sunset even though we threw stick baits, jigs, spoons, and anything else we had. We have never done well fishing on Alpha at sunset but we also never regretted trying. This night we stayed out late and watched the Milky Way from the middle of the lake. What a great experience.

One of the other new items we brought this year were LED headlamps. Jarod had high and low beam, I had white and red light. We laughed that his high beam was so bright we could almost see shore. The lights sure made it easy to get the canoe in after dark and we would use them around camp every night and in the tent. Hard to beat hands free light. We smoked cigars and went to bed about 10:30 PM. Both of us were very tired from fighting the sun and wind all day.

9-2-09. Tuesday.
The south wind blew all night and again today. This was the 3rd day like that but at least today was solid overcast. Hopefully it will be better fishing without the sun. While we ate breakfast, the canoe from the north camp settled on Alpha and stayed all morning. They must have known about it before they saw us on it yesterday.

We started on Beta but again didn’t do well so we moved to Filet south point where things were better. The constant wind blew in rain which started as a slow drizzle, then built to rain, and finally turned into a heavy downpour. The fishing was good, so we sat tight while the canoe began to fill up with rain water and things started to float inside the canoe. It poured so hard we couldn’t see shore for awhile. After about an hour it stopped and the canoe on Alpha was gone. Wimps. Several years ago we found Alpha in the rain; didn’t they know rain was good?

We fished a little while longer and then decided to have lunch at camp. Any shore lunch spots would be soaked which would require us to eat lunch in our rain suits. After sitting in the rain suits for the last few hours, we looked forward to getting out of them. Our camp was flooded but inside the tent was nice and dry. That was another new thing this year; a new ground cloth for inside the tent.

We took our time in camp and got a late start hoping the wind would go down; it didn’t. Alpha gave up fish for supper and we saw 2 gulls fight for the entrails. We hadn’t seen that in years. By the end of the day the wind shifted from the NW and cooler air was coming in. It cleared up enough for us to watch the stars for a short while before they were covered by clouds again.

By the time we went to bed, I was sleeping in my long johns with the tent flaps zipped up and I was inside the sleeping bag. Now that is more like it. Jarod woke me up at 4 AM concerned that the canoe needed to be tied down because the wind sounded awfully noisy in the trees. We got up, with our headlamps on, and satisfied ourselves that it didn’t need to be tied down. It was safely tucked into rocks and a tree, but it was better to be safe and check it out anyway. It started to rain again after we returned to the tent. It felt good to be inside and dry, out of the wind and water. All there was to do was sleep so we got busy doing it.

9-3-09. Wednesday.
We both slept about an hour later than usual and got up at 7 AM to a very wet campsite. Yesterday morning was warm, dry, and we were glad for overcast. Today was 60 degrees, wet, and we were hoping the clouds would go away. The heavy overcast slowly changed and by midmorning the sun came out and it was a beautiful day.

I was actually glad to have to put on a wool T-shirt, shirt, fleece jacket, wind breaker, long johns, and mittens. The wood was nice and dry under the tarp and a hot wood fire sure felt good on this cool morning. Our traditional roles were for Jarod to fix and care for the fire and for me to prepare and cook the food and wash the dishes. Today I noticed that Jarod was getting the food out of the packs, doing some mixing, and caring for the food while it was on the fire. If he saw it needed being done, he just did it. In all the years of camping, this was the first time he had done that. I could tell that being the cook at home had conditioned him to do those things out here. Once I was aware of it, I leaned back and thought how proud I was of him.

We stayed layered up all morning as we sat on Alpha and Beta in the north wind. The fishing was slow although we did catch several fish. Jarod got a 33” pike and I got a big walleye on Alpha. Jarod had several hook sets that were lost before he could get them to the canoe. I got bit off once and broke off the white helicopter jig. Wally caught a nice pike which when filleted for lunch, had a 10” smallie inside its stomach. We saw one canoe heading east and one canoe in the north bay.

Today was a perfect day for lunch on the cliff. It afforded us to get out of the constant wind and strip down to only two layers of clothes while we sat in the sun. We saw an eagle sitting on gull rock and earlier during breakfast another was in one of the tall trees above camp. They never did take the entrails while we were on the cliff. Even on Fillet Island, we had to be out of site before the eagles would come down to the ground.

Being out of the wind was nice so we fished the west bay next to gull rock. I paddled slowly as Jarod cast a spoon for pike as we did a slow counter clockwise circle around the bay. He had a few strikes and did catch a very nice pike. It was very enjoyable to just watch him cast knowing that every cast could be a fish. We were in no hurry, so we just savored the moment of working together in the canoe on such a perfect spot of the universe.

After supper, we cast from camp shore in the dead calm water. Once again Jarod caught something with his homemade perch topwater. That thing is a fish catching machine. I gave up on the jitterbug this year and bought a new Rapala Skitter Pop. On one of my casts, I stopped reeling about half way in and I saw a pike do a slow roll out of the water to swallow it. It is so exciting when the fish come out of the water to hit a topwater.

As we sat smoking our cigars, we noticed a thin line of white clouds directly to the north. It took a few minutes for us to realize that it was dark and we couldn’t see white clouds. This was the northern lights! Right on the horizon, one white spot appeared, then a couple more, until a continuous line was formed. Then they started to swirl and grow taller, then fall, then start over again. We sat speechless as we watched something that appeared so spectacular that it must be man made but we knew it was all natural.

Slowly the entire sky to the north lit up with a white, illuminating haze. The sky and lake to the left of us was black while the sky and lake to the right of us were bright white. Every 5 minutes something else developed that we had never seen before. Then the haze developed into several bands that stretched over us from the east horizon to the west horizon. Under them to the north were bands of northern lights. It was like watching a screen saver in slow motion as it kept morphing into different designs.

It was still going on when we went to bed an hour later. When I got up to pee about 1 AM, it was still dead calm with light spots in the north and a heavy white haze all around the sky.

9-4-08. Thursday.
This is the day that signals we are half way through the trip. It was only 45 degrees this morning as I loaded up with all the layers that I had before climbing out of the tent. Now we were camping! The heavy dew deposited tiny water drops on everything in sight. A solid overcast sky prevented the sun from burning off the fog which was rolling across to the west. There were dozens of thin white spikes of fog all the same height which gave the illusion of an army of fog soldiers slowly marching across the water. As the fog began to lift, a family of 12 mergansers left the rocks just north of camp and swam off across the open water to the east.

Our buddies were sitting on Alpha again so we decided to return the favor and fish by their campsite. We went to the rock pile that is in the middle of the north channel of the bay that leads to the Wawiag. Jigging 12 cranks deep, we got several walleye, pike, and small mouth. Jarod caught a pike with his big bucktail so it gets to come back next year.

Next we moved to Walleye Island. As we paddled past Alpha, our friends had moved up shallow close to the rock piles. The rest of the morning was spent catching walleye and smallies in the little bay behind Walleye Island. We had lunch on Suick Island at a little campsite on the very tip by the main channel. It was good to see that the whole island was full of 10-15 foot pine trees spaced about 4 feet apart. The branches were all touching each other which made it a small thick forest. Lunch was spent the usual way for a cool day; sitting in the sun, out of the breeze, watching the lake and the sky. In this case we had a great view of the SE end of Kawnipi and Suick Bay.

The afternoon was spent moving around Suick Bay catching dozens of pike and smallies. We started out in the deep main channel and slowly moved into the shallow back bay. The larger pike and small mouth were in the deeper channel water and the smaller pike were in the shallow weeds. I got a smallie on a Johnson minnow while trying to catch pike. Jarod did well with his homemade perch bait, as always. We laughed as a pike jumped completely out of the water trying to hit his bait. A little while later he pulled off a fishing first and had a hooked pike jump into the canoe. He reeled the fish in next to canoe when it made a predicted run. The water exploded, the pole bent, we heard the metal sound of the lure hitting the leader, and the next thing we knew the fish came over the side and into the canoe. By the time the action had stopped, that fish must have flopped a hundred times and the entire midsection of the canoe was coated with pike slime.