Wednesday, June 02, 2010 Waking up to a gorgeous day is always a good thing. I chopped some firewood after breakfast so we had some for a fire when we got back from our daytrip exploring the east end of Kekekabic. Vickie loaded up her Duluth pack and off we went. It was one of those days where when the sun was out it was almost too hot. And when it went behind a cloud it was almost too cold. We paddled until we got to the narrows where there was a campsite on the north side behind some islands to take a break. This was an absolutely awesome site as well. There is a great view of the islands from this site which sits up about 20 feet above the water. We snacked on some Clif bars and basked in the sunshine before moving on. There were some brightly colored orangish flowers upon some of the steeper cliffs as we paddled by. We checked out most of the campsites along the way. With the exception of the one just mentioned, none came close to being as nice as ours. We stopped for lunch at the second to last site at the east end. There was a large pine at that site that was a likely victim of the '99 storm. There were 3 large stumps cut from it that made great tables. As with virtually each spot we'd been to this point, there were flowers in bloom everywhere.
We finished our lunch and headed back west, trolling along the way. I picked up a nice eater just below the big cliffs on the north side by the campsite in the fishhook bay. For the first time we ran across some other paddlers. A large group(9) paddled past us. We ran across them again just up the lake. They were looking for a campsite. We directed them to the nice one we stopped at earlier, just a half mile west of our present position. The loons now showed no fear of Vickie and swam within close proximity of The Black Pearl on a regular basis. We leisurely paddled back to camp. Once there I began cleaning the lake trout I kept while Vickie started the fire and began preparing the side dishes. We had another great tasting meal of trout. I even skun this one so Vickie had no complaints.LOL
Another gorgeous evening around the campfire with cocktails in hand, while loon calls echoed across the lake, and NO bugs. What could be better? Vickie asked if I brought alot of people up here? I told her, "probably not as many as you'd think?" She replied, "How could anyone NOT completely enjoy an evening like this on a beautiful lake with a great campsite?!!" I gave her the simple truth. "Most EVERYONE I know would absolutely LOVE to be here right now!" "But, the vast majority would probably want to go home after the simple (At least to me?) 5 rod Swamp portage. Not even mentioning the much tougher ones we did later." Which I told her was a good thing. Because if it wasn't "somewhat" tough to get back in here, then everybody WOULD be here. With that we called it a night. Kekekabic Lake