Finally underway! Under a gray sky two canoes and all our gear were loaded onto a towboat, aboard which we soon found ourselves ratcheting along over a choppy bay as we ran half an hour into a brisk, eye-watering chilly northerly wind towards our drop-off point at Hook Island on Saganaga Lake. The towboat deposited our canoes and gear on the pebbly beach in a sheltered bay on the island’s western side and when he motored out of sight, we were on our own. We’d stowed the humongous packs and our other gear in the canoes and had started rigging our fishing tackle when we discovered that we weren’t as alone on the island as we’d thought, this little guy ran out of the woods and made himself right at home among our gear.

A juvenile red squirrel, I think? Maybe he was Canada’s official greeter, or maybe he had heard rumors about the heaviest tackle bag in the land and wanted to check it out personally by clambering aboard. Either way, he cost me my helper because Elissa spent the next ten minutes coaxing him to take a peanut from her hand (which he eventually did) while I finished rigging our rods. We got our introduction to fishing before ever getting into our canoes: as I’d rig a rod I’d make a few casts from the beach to make sure all was working, and I caught three SMB right there, modest fish of 12 to 15 inches in length, but an encouraging start! Soon enough we were underway and pulled out of the bay on Hook Island into the solid chop created by a brisk 15 knot NW wind. We paddled north into the lee of a towering shoreline, then turned to follow the shoreline to the southwest for a fairly calm run towards the entrance to Cache Bay. The calm conditions quickly disappeared when we rounded the point into the open waters of Cache Bay, and all hands pulled hard to make way into a foot-and-a-half chop that was square on our bow. Muscle burn had set in by the time we landed on the Cache Bay ranger station docks, but after a half hour talk with ranger Janice and another half hour spent enjoying a picnic lunch on the dock we were sufficiently recovered to get underway again. We went around the western side of the ranger station and then turned to the northwest, once again fighting a headwind, but since we’d been told that this was a good area for lake trout we decided to troll during this leg of our voyage. Our canoe dropped a Deep Taildancer on one rod and a silver spoon behind a heavy trolling sinker on another, and at about the time the depth sounder started showing fish suspended at 50 feet in 80 feet of water I hooked up on the Taildancer. By the time I landed the strong fish, a laker of about 26 inches, we’d blown downwind almost a quarter of a mile! We got re-set, used the GPS to follow the same track, and Elissa was soon hooked up on the spoon to a fish which proved to be a twin to mine.

Her first-ever freshwater trout of any species, and her first-ever fish in Canada. Not a bad start! We made several more passes through the fish and we got bit almost every time. A series of missed strikes and pulled hooks meant that we didn’t land another fish, though Elissa did hook a laker that was much larger than the two we caught . She had it thrashing on the surface boat side but before I could grab it, it threw the spoon. The hurtling lure caught in Elissa’s hand but both Elissa and the fish benefited from the barbless hook regulation on the exchange! I’m not sure what size is likely on these fish, but I’d say that the lost fish could have weighed in the mid-teens. Really. Byron and Stacey trolled alongside for a while but they didn’t have the tackle to fish as deeply as we and they did not score. I think that with better weather that we might have caught quite a few fish there, but after a half-dozen passes we were nearing exhaustion from fighting the wind and decided to continue northward towards the calm waters of the narrow passage which leads to Silver Falls. The Silver Falls portage, about which we’d heard so much was going to be our first experience with portaging. For you guys who do a lot of this stuff this is apparently not a particularly challenging portage,but for our group of Floridians who live in a place where about the only hills we encounter are fire ant mounds and freeway overpasses and about as far as anyone carries a canoe is from the side of the house around to the driveway to load it on the truck, it became an epic adventure! Somehow we survived the ordeal without damage to people or to equipment, and we even got to see a grouse along the trail, but legs and backs were definitely complaining at trail’s end on Saganagons Lake. Byron is quite a good cook who did lots of pre-trip menu planning and as a result I’d bet that during our trip that we ate as well as any other group in the Quetico, but it occurred to me during the portage that there was a down side to hauling steaks, potatoes, onions, sausages and a spare cook stove and fuel. Elissa grumbled something about my tackle bag but I didn’t quite catch what she said.

We did encounter another party going the other way on this portage: a father with two youngsters of not more than eight or ten years old who said they were returning from a trip to Blackstone Lake.

Our intended campsite for the first night was just over two miles to the north on Saganagons, near the entrance to the waterway which leads out of Blackstone Lake. When we cleared the narrows below Silver Falls and reached the open waters of Saganagons we were once again paddling almost dead into that persistent northerly wind, and after a mile or so someone quipped that Quetico must be the Indian word for “Always Headwind”. We were a little surprised that the first three campsites we passed were all occupied, but the more northern portion of the lake was completely deserted and when we reached our intended island site it was vacant. We found the landing, carried our gear up the hill to the campsite and fumbled our way through our first effort at erecting unfamiliar tents and making the site our temporary home.

Then it was time to prepare the first of our camp dinners, skillet fried steak and lake trout (we’d kept one of the lakers from Cache Bay) at a fire ring with a first rate view of the sunset, courtesy of a sun which finally appeared after a mostly overcast day.

After a fantastic dinner we had s’mores, an important ritual which was to be repeated every night at every site.

Byron claimed that his ever-present cigars would help keep the mosquitos at bay, but I think our permethrin-treated clothing, OFF sprayed arms, and Thermacells were more effective (and less stinky).