EP16 - I-R-O-N Lake Fishing Expedition
by lyontyl
Day 6 was a travel day to get us closer to the entry point. We packed up our gear after a quick breakfast of oatmeal with wild blueberries and set off.
The wind was in our favor this day and the weather was nice a cool. We opted to take a different route on the way back to keep things fresh and after the horrid, muddy Bottle Lake portage we opted to go straight south from there and take the ranger station portage on LLC which would result in us back on Boulder Bay and very close to where we camped the first night. We paddled the boulder river and took different portage than we did on entry to get to Agnes. Another mud hole portage. It was abundantly clear at this time that although these portages may normally be muddy they were a mess with low water.
We made it onto onto lake Agnes in time for a later lunch. The lake was clearly full of campers as we say 5 canoes just canoeing on the lake. We were on the northeast side of the lake so we made our way down the side of the lake and finally found a open spot on the east side. I don't even know if this could have a star associated with this spot. Terrible spot, time to bust out the two-way radios and split up. Nick and I jump in the canoe and head across the lake to the west side to find a better spot. We found an empty camp across the lake but again, absolutely terrible. On our third attempt we found an acceptable camp site (maybe a 2 star?) littered with stable flies but at this point we couldn't be picky. We setup camp, made friends with a curious chipmunk, and relaxed for a bit.
We had alfredo and noodles for supper and rigged up for our final night of fishing.
I jumped in with Jon and we decided to troll across the lake and see if we could pick up a roaming pike on the way to a reef that we had seen on the depth charts. I did pick up a medium sized pike out deep on a 25 ft. rattling crank bait but that was it.
We arrived at the reef and fished around it as we tried to learn the grades and contours. I picked up a very nice smallie and two walleye while Jon continued his conquest with his secret lure and continued to entice pike and smallmouth to bite. It was amazing what this lure could do as the sun went down. Nick and Captn' came over to scope out what we were up to and they caught a couple fish as well. Nick caught his personal best walleye soon after at 26 inches which also had a bonus lamprey attached to it. This is the first I have seen a fresh water lamprey, they are an interesting creature.