The predawn light woke me, or maybe it was the sound of a light rain pattering on the tent fly. Either way I was awake on an island surrounded by fish. What would you do? I quietly launched a canoe so as to not disturb the three late rising members of our party and paddled to the area where Elissa and I had caught our best fish the afternoon prior. I decided to use only my fly rod this morning, a rod which had not gotten much use thus far in the trip. From an anchored the canoe in the drizzly conditions I shook out the line and began casting with a floating line and a popper. There were no takers so I switched to a streamer and caught one nice fish, but no more. I switched to a sinking line and an articulated leech pattern I’d tied for the trip and after 30 minutes of dredging I’d taken one more fish. Some action, but hardly what we’d had the day before, so I switched to the other side of the lake to an area we’d not yet fished. Maybe I just needed some new water! I went back to the floating line, went old school with a simple wooly bugger pattern, and started casting to deadfalls as I drifted along the shoreline. I soon caught a couple of fish including this chunk:

She was taken on a cast which landed a foot from shore under an overhanging limb. When the fly touched the water she pushed a wake from five feet away along the shoreline when charging to nab the lure. Exciting stuff! I photo’d her on the paddle blade for reference, she measured 20.5 inches with closed mouth and pinched tail (the fish, not me!). She fought hard and anyone watching would have laughed at our antics when she spun the canoe in two or three complete circles. I released her and continued fishing for another half hour, finally returning to camp having taken seven smallies on the fly rod. As I approached the island campsite I saw that Byron was fishing from shore on the eastern end of the island where he caught a couple of SMB and a northern.

The girls soon stumbled bleary-eyed out into the damp, cool Canadian air. We cooked breakfast and then broke camp for our planned move to another site on Jasper Lake for our final night. Fortunately the drizzle had fizzled during breakfast and we were able to get underway without rain as we backtracked across the two easy portages out of Fran Lake, through Slate Lake and back to Saganagons, where we turned south for a mile long paddle (into a stiff southerly headwind of course) to reach the portage to Lillypad lake. One of our maps showed this as an 83 rod portage, and the other showed 99 rods, but apparently portage distance measurements do not include vertical travel or the dimensions would have been much bigger. This portage was the steepest that we traversed during our trip, and provided a workout for our party of flatlanders as we clambered up and down the mountain. At one point thought I heard mountain sheep bleating, but it could have been delirium from altitude sickness. A couple of deadfalls that crossed the trail just made the hike that much more challenging!

Reaching Lilypad Lake we dug our way across the open portion, again into the headwind, and at the southern end had to search a little to find the disguised beginning of the portage to Jasper Lake. The Lilypad to Jasper portage was shorter and flatter than our last, but it was pretty muddy, especially at the beginning. We saw moose tracks and moose droppings aplenty, but no moose, much to the disappointment of the girls neither of whom have ever seen one of the creatures. We did find some beautiful wildflowers along the trail, including these:

And many more which we didn’t take the time to photograph. We also enjoyed our introduction to deer flies here, an outdoor treat that we’d managed to miss thus far in the trip. We reached Jasper Lake in good order, washed the muck off our legs and got underway for a half-mile open water paddle to reach the island campsite that we’d picked for the night. (Yes, against a headwind!) This was yet another beautiful site (all of ours were spectacular on this trip), though the canoe landing was a little rough, especially with the southerly wind blowing directly onto the landing. We set up camp here and encountered the only refuse that we’d seen on the entire trip: one shoe and one sock. Who leaves a shoe? Anyway, we were set up by early afternoon so we enjoyed a picnic lunch, then shoved off to explore and fish around the lake. This was relatively big, open water on a windy day so we were somewhat limited, but we did catch a couple of northerns and got into a bunch of SMB, though none of the sizes we’d caught on Fran Lake. Once again the Berkley Gulp leeches were the hot ticket for the SMB. Side note: we found a beautiful submerged reef near the campsite, an underwater escarpment which rose to within about 18 feet of the surface in surrounding water of 50 or 60 feet deep. We fished this pretty hard but never took a fish there, in spite of casting crank baits, trolling divers around the edges and bouncing our deadly jig/Gulp combos along the bottom. Oh well, it looked good on paper.

We retreated to the campsite for our final camp dinner, enjoyed yet another feast, did the s’mores thing one last time, then cleaned up and took a few photos. Here’s Byron and Stacey:

Here’s Elissa and I:

It was truly, truly a magnificent site. As darkness neared we started noticing furtive movements in the shadows around the edge of the fire’s light, and finally spotted the culprit: a tiny mouse-like creature that was not quite bold enough to venture among the humans, in spite of the wonderful smells emanating from our meal.