Wednesday, August 23, 2023

For the third consecutive morning, we wake up to overcast skies, humidity, mid 50's temperatures and on and off rain along with the day's bonus element- fog! We made our way through the lily pad riddled river-like section to North Lake and into South Lake. By then most of the fog was gone and the temperatures are slowly improving for the first time since Monday morning. Most of the misty rain was gone too, at least for a while. The portage from South Lake to Steep Lake is exactly as advertised- tough and uphill almost the whole way and felt longer than the 110 rods listed on the map. We head through Steep, portage into Eugene and notice the mid-lake site on the narrows is open, which will be our back-up plan if the site on Fat Lake is already occupied.

We paddle to the Fat Lake portage and I decided to go across with just my day pack and the canoe to go check the site as I didn't realize it would be visible from the other end of the portage. When I got there, my hopes quickly faded as I saw a canoe out fishing and several people walking around the site. I took the chance anyway, paddled across the lake to talk to the guy out fishing and he mentions they'll be leaving in a couple hours. My spirits buoyed by that news, I paddled to the site to talk to the rest of their group. It's a mixed group of 9 adults and youth and while they invite me to stay for breakfast and show me the trout they have been successful in catching, I tell them my son is waiting on the portage back on Eugene and is probably wondering why I'm not back yet. I let them know we'll keep our distance so they can enjoy their breakfast, then paddle back, get Jaden and portage the rest of the gear to Fat. We decided to wait across the lake on a rocky flat area, had a quick snack and filtered some water and then decided to try trollling for some of Fat Lakes famous little lake trout. No luck, but when we saw the group get into their canoes to leave, we grabbed our gear and headed over to the site.

With the rains at least temporarily gone, we took some much needed time to spread out wet gear to let it dry. Rain was still in the forecast for later that day and into the overnight, but getting things dried out while we relaxed around camp was a nice mental diversion. We made a couple more trolling loops around the deeper parts of the lake in the afternoon with no luck and also located the unofficial portage from Flat to Slim in preparation for taking that the next morning. For the first time since Sunday I decided to swim- the lake was cold but it felt good to rinse off some layers of sweat and grime. With temps only in the mid-60's the swimming didn’t last long.

In between light rain I made a couple more solo trips out in the canoe in front of the site. Three different times I got bites on my little cleo as it fluttered towards the depths, but all three times I come up empty. Alas, there would be no trout as about 7:00 PM the rains came back and drove me back to camp and into my hammock for the night. The 8 or so consecutive hours of dry weather was the longest we had in days, but we'll still be packing up wet gear for our trek back towards the EP in the morning.