Thursday June 18th We leave Cherokee about 8:40 and encounter a nice bull moose on shore by our portage to Gordon. Gordon looks more like a river than a lake and there is a group of guys doing well on the northerns in there. The portage out of Gordon into the Long Island river is not marked on my Voyageur map but is easy to find. We float and rock hop the other rapids in the river and get back to Long Island, skip the portage and instead paddle around to Karl and start to backtrack our first days route through Karl, Rib and Crossbay. It's funny how you see neat new stuff that you missed coming in. We paddled a long finger of Crossbay west, meandered up a creek and crossed a beaver dam to get to the Snipe portage. It's not a nice little portage. Upon entering Snipe, we come across a couple from Australia. They tell us the rest of Snipe is empty so we head for the Northwest site. It's a nice site with a great view from the firepit area. The tarp is just about up when lilcowdoc arrives. She has the day off and has paddled down from Round, through Missing Link to Snipe. We get the tarp and tents up and the sky is getting dark. It starts to rain....first rain on the trip....so we sit under the tarp and chat and eat gorp. The storm passes just in time to get supper ready. We have spaghetti and LCD bakes us some bread in her reflector oven. It stays clear for a campfire night but gets cool and breezy. After going to bed, a big storm rolls in and really pounds us from about 2 to 4am.