Friday, August 14, 2009

Smallmouth bass for breakfast and a late start as we only planned on going to east Pike that day to be a little closer to the out on Saturday. A 177 rod into east Pike followed by the discovery that the only open site on the lake sucked, pretty lake though.

So, we took the last portage into John lake, 211 rods on which I suffered the only injury of the trip. I know the risks of wearing opened toed shoes on portages, but often find myself wearing them for comfort anyway. While portaging the heaviest canoe, my right ankle rolled slightly, which caused me to bring my left foot up quickly to catch myself and in the process stubbed my left big toe and took a large flap of skin off the bottom of my toe. Let that be a lesson to all, as I have learned it a few times now. I guess I wanted to justify carrying the first aid kit the whole trip? Anyway, we thought if we don't get a site on John, oh well it's been a great trip. The first site was open abeit a little crappy, so we saved it and scouted again. The other two were taken, so the choice was made that we would rather spend a night at a so so site than leave early. When we pulled the canoes out of the water there were several leeches on the bottoms, but some went swimming anyway. When my friend got out he had a leech on his foot and in the process of taking it off it exploded and 100 baby leeches came out and were all over his foot. His remark after several minutes of cleaning them off was,"I'm just glad it didn't happen to one of the ladies." This last site was also the only one where we saw any ticks. It also contained the largest Jack pine tree any of us had ever seen. It had to be at least 40 ft. tall with a trunk 3 ft in diameter! That night we had Caribbean rice with tuna and chocolate chip cake made in the outback oven. Sang alot and talked about what a great trip it had been.