Today we fish! We had breakfast, secured camp and hit the water early. The sun had yet to grace us with its presence. I loaded the food barrel into the canoe for ballast as well as for any wandering bears' sake. We headed north towards Thursday bay.

I have always taken a fish finder and placed the transducer under my seat in a baggie full of water and shot through the hull with it. It works but this year I purchased a mount for it and was able to place it directly in the water. It worked so much better and I could get surface temps too. Today the surface temp was around 74 degrees.

We trolled all the way into Thursday Bay paying special attention to all the neck downs, currents and little islands. That's where the majority of the fish were. To put it lightly we smashed 'em and not just little fish either.

Our two biggest fish were a 38" Northern and a 26" walleye. The best thing is they were both caught at the same time. There is a neck down at an island just north of site 1858 and we repeatedly caught fish here. We trolled back and forth through there a few times. There is a shallow weed flat just before you get into the neck down and it's fairly shallow through it as well but right where it begins to open back up it drops off about 8' and its like a little glory hole!

Little current and Big current were productive as well and as luck would have it I finally seen my first otters up there. Just on the north side of Thursday Bay we had made a turn to head back east and south when I heard a weird wheezing sound. From videos at home I knew exactly what it was. A family of otters were swimming away rom an island right toward us. We stopped paddling and watched them float on their backs and talk to us for a minute before they slipped under the surface and out of sight. I was ecstatic. I had wanted to see otters more than I wanted to see a moose.

We fished the entire area for most of the day and even caught fish through 2pm. Nary a soul in site all day. It was like we were in another world where nobody existed. I couldn't believe it was this empty up here. This is a popular area for fishing and camping but even more so for a thoroughfare for loop trippers yet it was empty. I was extremely thankful and we counted our blessing as well as our fish!

We returned to camp and tied a long paracord to a tree and backed the canoe out as far as the paracord would reach and dropped the stringer of fish. It was about 20 foot deep and they were still quite lively when we pulled them out for dinner.

We kept an extra fish or two more than the night before so we feasted on nothing but pan fried fish for dinner. Fat and content we enjoyed a beautiful sky, saw another deer and discovered that there was an eagles nest up the hill behind our site. We had numerous sightings of the parent eagle/s and it wasn't until the next day when we went on a hike I actually discovered what tree the nest was in. I couldn't really see the nest but I could hear the eagles chick talking and the ground below was a pretty good indicator as well.