We were up early and broke camp, with intentions of making it to the end of Bald Eagle Lake in time to find a good campsite. Of course, that’s when we started catching the walleyes that had eluded earlier in the trip. We found a couple nice drifts at the south end of Gabbro Lake, just out from the island campsite. The leaches we had hauled around for several days finally paid off, and I pulled a fat 19-inch walleye out of the water just as Derek was landing another keeper. Then we started catching huge crappies along with the walleyes. The action was fast and furious, and at one point, I had just put one big (13-inch) crappie on the stringer and was grabbing one off Rob’s line when it flopped and fell off the hook. I instinctively grabbed for the fish, at the same time letting go of the end of our stringer, which in super-slow-motion slipped over the side of the canoe, hung tantalizingly just out of reach for about 2 seconds, then disappeared into the depths. There goes lunch. Luckily, the other boat had a few walleyes on their stringer, and we caught a few more, enough for a great shore lunch on the rocky rapids between Gabbro and Bald Eagle. There we met a family of five, including three early teenage kids, that had come from the other way, had been there for almost a week, and hadn’t caught a single fish yet. The dad and son had tried to ride down a set of rapids, tipped over, gotten banged up, and nearly trashed their canoe in the process. While we were talking to them, their 12-year-old daughter went running along the rocks, slipped and went crashing into the water. Luckily it was about 3 feet deep so she came out without getting hurt. We offered them some fishing advice and gave them some of our more successful baits to try. They were very grateful. I can’t imagine going someplace like that and not being able to catch fish, so hopefully our advice helped. We got into more walleyes on the other side of the rapids, caught enough for dinner, then tackled Bald Eagle Lake. I’d heard this can be tough if the wind’s wrong, and it was wrong for us. After blowing out of the west the previous several days, the wind was out of the east just in time for our crossing, so we had 1-2 foot waves and a serious headwind to deal with. It wasn’t what I would consider fun, but we managed, and found the two campsites at the southeast corner of the lake open. Neither were great sites, so we chose the site farthest south, figuring it was more open and would offer a nice breeze to keep the bugs away. Go figure, this was our buggiest night of the trip by far. But before the bugs could get to us, we went fishing. Anxious to try something new, I looked through my small tackle box for the hundredth dime and, for the first time, pulled out a black buzz-bait and tied it on. Two or three casts later, a small pike erupted out of the water and slammed the bait. This was the start of perhaps the most exciting 3 hours of fishing of my life, and that’s saying something. In that time, fishing the bottom part of Bald Eagle Lake and the first several hundred yards of the Isabella River, I probably had 80 to 90 fish hit – basically every 2 or 3 casts. And they didn’t just hit once. I’d throw the bait onto the grassy weeds that lined the shore, and pull it quickly to the open water. Once it hit that open water, hold on tight. The pike would follow it from under the weeds, then slam it as soon as it started gurgling across the surface. Most of the time, they’d miss on the first hit, and on the second and third. If I hadn’t hooked them by the time the lure reached the canoe, I’d usually see them lurking down below, ready for another attack. No problem. Throw it back out 10 feet and they’d be right back at it. I probably caught 35 pike, none of them over 30 inches, but most of them fairly solid 20-plus, with a few hammer-handles thrown in. Rob, who spends most of his time fly fishing for trout, didn’t have a buzz bait to try, and while he didn’t get into the same number of fish I did, still had a blast, especially when he hooked into a 19-inch smallmouth. That bad boy gave Rob the battle of his life. That night, we enjoyed walleye and pike, along with the customary Zatteran’s rice. The mosquitoes were terrible, the first time in our trip that they really bothered us. We ate dinner with our head nets pulled down to our upper lips. Finally, after we got a nice fire going, the mosquitoes quieted down a bit. We finished off the Tang and Parrot’s Bay, then moved on to Jack Daniels and lemon aide, which really hit the spot. Throw in a nice cigar and the mosquitoes weren’t really bothering us any longer. That night, trying to hurry into our tent to avoid the bugs, the zipper on the rain fly got stuck. We had talked to a group that had just come in earlier in the day, and they said it was supposed to be nice for the next few days, so we didn’t worry about it, until the thunder woke us up around 2:30 a.m. Then I was out in the dark, with the thunder and lightening putting on quite a show, trying to get the zipper fixed. Finally, after about 10 minutes of tinkering, we got it right (our tent, a Sierra Designs, just had a mesh door, so without the rain fly completely zipped down and staked in, we were in trouble). The storm hit us pretty hard, but we stayed dry.