Monday, June 17, 2013 Another travel day. Our tow back to Zups was at 10 am on our return day, so we decided to camp on Iron Lake closer to the bottle portage than on Crooked lake which I would have preferred. It was a little breezy as we headed south towards the portage to middle Roland. We passed by the southern bay where the bass action was so hot the day before-it was hard not to get out our poles. It was a short portage to middle roland and then another lift over to the river that would take us to Crooked lake. The river had a lot of cabbage weeds, looked like a pike factory; but we resisted the temptation to unpack our poles and pushed on. We were able to shorten the portage to Crooked because of relatively high water, and it was an easy paddle to Curtain falls. We had our picture taken by a fellow who was daytripping with 2 of his kids at the exact same spot we were standing at on last years trip. The portage seemed a lot harder to me this year than it did last year, so I fiegned a bruised ankle and let my son do some extra walking. We had some trepidations about going through the shoot downstream from the portage on Iron because we heard some many stories of people dumping there. We knew these calamaties were always people heading upstream; but we thought we were capable of dumping going the other direction.. There was a group lining their canoe upstream as we raced through the shoot. I am sure we looked like accomplished canoe racing efficianados to them. It was pretty windy as we set our sites toward the small island campsite near Rebecca falls. I took a compass bearing and as usual went right by the channel to the island. I corrected our course after paddling 10 minutes past our channel. I brought enough batteries to run my GPS continuously for 100 years, so my son after awhile queried me as to why I didnt check it more often. I still dont have a good answer to that one, but it did allow us to see more of Quetico. Our island site was unoccupied. Its a pretty nice site but there is a little marsh on the island, so we had some bug problems. We set up our stuff, ate some fried summer sausage and cheese sandwiches, and then went fishing. The water in Iron lake was tannin stained and fishing was very slow. We managed a trifecta of a few small bass, pike, and walleye before an ominous looking storm cloud chased us back to our island. The bugs and the rain then chased us into our domiciles. I brought a couple of books and actually enjoyed reading for a few hours while the storm passed. We ate some more sausage for dinner, cast all around the island to no avail, and then called it a day.