The day is gray and getting progressively windier. It's very gusty by the time I paddle out of camp, having taken my time trudging around the muddy campsite while packing up. It's significantly cooler than the previous day. Periodic sprinkles mingle with the wind to make paddling west-northwest quite unpleasant, but I prefer it, I guess, to the oppressive calm of the day before. When I turn up into Vern Lake, there are surprisingly large waves for such a small lake. I fight the waves up the lake and make it to the campsite on the western side of the lake right about the time the rain starts to slack off. The wind, alas, keeps up until just before sunset.

My original plan had been to explore into Pipe and/or up into Juno today. While I'm not exactly windblown, paddling my tandem canoe backwards in wind like this isn't any fun. Plus, it's too windy to fish, so I luxuriate in the cooler weather (bug-free, too, by the way) reading books, the newspaper, and drinking Nescafe with sugar in it. This "coffee" is undrinkable when not in a third-world country or in the woods, but on a windy point with a good book in the Boundary Waters, it tastes...well, still crappy. But it's drinkable. :)

The night is uneventful. Windy all day. Pretty typical post-storm high pressure is moving in, and the skies eventually clear and stay that way for most of the rest of the trip. I finish an entire book and head to bed. I catch one dinky pike casting off shore, but that's about it. I know that sometime during the day I realized I'd not brought something, but I can't remember now what I forgot.