We started our morning early today as we had hoped to beat the wind, much as we were successful at when traveling to Ogish two days ago. Unfortunately, we were met with a cold, windy day as we left camp at 7:45AM.

The wind was in an unusual direction out of the Northeast and stiff. As I looked over our route back to Seagull Lake, I knew we were in a bad situation. We slipped into Kingfisher Lake and even encountered whitecaps on this small lake. It seemed to only grow in intensity as we continued on our trek.

After stopping for a brief stop at the Jasper Falls for our annual “boys at the falls” photo opportunity, we put into Alpine Lake. The current coming out of the falls slammed into the whitecaps blowing into the discharge. The convergence created an interesting water trap that we had to navigate.

We decided to take the two portages through Rog Lake rather than the 100 rod farther north in an effort to meet the wind off Seagull Lake head on. By taking the 100 rod portage we feared we would take whitecaps to our port side as we crossed Seagull. As we ended our last portage from Rog to Seagull, we were met with an angry Seagull Lake.

We knew we had a 6 mile stretch into this head wind, so we powered down a “Kudo’s” bar and headed off. We took a brief rest stop behind a small island and another by the two islands off of Three Mile Island. This was the most difficult paddle of the trip and quite tiring. As we headed north toward our targeted campsite, we noticed a front moving in from the west – behind us. East wind and a westward moving storm – it was a weird situation. Before we made camp, we paddled the last 30 minutes in a downpour. We arrived at camp to a stead downpour. We elected to put up the tent and just crash. We were too tired after our push through Seagull to even eat. We thought that we would rest a bit and perhaps the rain would let up – to no avail. The rain locked in and remained for the rest of the night. We settled in knowing that our departure was set for morning and drifted off to a long evening in the tent.

The day’s totals: 5 portages, 193 rods and 8.5 miles of territory. Started the day at 7:45AM and arrived at Seagull Lake at 2:00PM.