Boundary Waters, Trip Reports, BWCA, Stories

Quetico Trip #2: Seasick in a Canoe?
by cptrea

Trip Type: Paddling Canoe
Entry Date: 06/23/2012
Entry & Exit Point: Quetico
Number of Days: 7
Group Size: 2
Day 2 of 7
Sunday, June 24, 2012

Our big day, the first that we’d be on the water, dawned clear, but cool enough and breezy enough that our early morning towboat ride across Saganaga Lake to Hook Island brought tears to our eyes. We’d checked the week’s weather forecast one last time at the outfitter’s office prior to our departure and it looked good: mostly clear skies, low temps in the mid-40s with highs in the upper 60s to low 70s all week, so we we we’d prepared for a chilly morning by donning our winter wear. If we’d been at home in SW Florida we’d have been sweating by 9am! Fortunately today’s 15 knot wind was easterly so after we said goodbye to the tow boat operator and got ourselves underway we had a tailwind for much of the 45 minute paddle to the Cache Bay Ranger Station.

The water level was much higher this year than last, so high that the floating dock, ramp and landing were all almost perfectly level. After a quick check-in with the assistant ranger (Janice was absent) we took turns treating our tushes to the last latrine facilities upon which we’d perch for nearly a week, then retreated to the dock to rig our fishing gear on the picnic table. Last year we’d had great success with lake trout immediately to the northwest of the ranger station so we wanted to be ready to fish as soon as we departed the island. We rigged deep running plugs, trolling sinkers and spoons and proceeded to spend the next two or three hours discovering that we weren’t as smart as we’d thought. Using GPS and depth sounder we thoroughly worked our hotspots from last year, then tried both deeper and shallower, all to no avail. We finally did manage to find some schools of suspended bait when we moved to water less than 40 feet deep, but caught nothing while trolling around them.

Around lunchtime we figuratively tossed in the trout towel and headed for the western side of Cache Bay where we planned to spend our first day with a visit to the pictographs. Enroute to the pictograph area our first challenge would be a very short portage over a narrow neck of land separating Cache Bay proper from the pictograph bay, but the high water level made this portage a push-through where we needed only to step out of the canoe and pull it over some cut-off branches which blocked what would have been otherwise been a float-through. This meant there were to be no actual portages on our first day! We celebrated by stopping for lunch at the campsite adjacent to this non-portage.

Once across the non-portage we switched to shoreline fishing mode, planning to fish our way around the perimeter of the bay towards the pictograph site. In short order we began picking smallmouths as we went, and it was when we caught a nice fish off a blowdown that I realized that we hadn’t yet put any rocks into our anchor bag and had no way to hold the boat in place. We pulled up to a rocky point which offered a suitable landing area and Elissa hopped ashore to collect rocks, but our plans quickly went astray when she discovered the the tip of the point was covered with blueberry plants which were sporting a sprinkling of early season ripe berries. We’d been told that we were probably too early for blueberries in Quetico, but here they were! Elissa grabbed an empty baggie from our lunch leavings and abandoned me to find my own rocks while she went berry picking.

With the next mornings blueberry pancakes now assured we resumed fishing, and we did pretty well. The smallies weren’t huge or thick, but they were decent sized fish and there were enough that we seldom went more than ten minutes without a fish.

You might notice Elissa’s favorite plug, a Storm Thin Fin which she fished for most of our trip, and with which she kept pace with me in spite of my repeated lure changes. Sometimes we over-think stuff, I think.

We caught northerns too, including this specimen Elissa took on six pound that was probably our biggest of the trip. We strung two smallmouths for dinner, selecting two that were under the 35 cm maximum size limit.

As we neared the area of the pictograph site we put away the fishing tackle to begin our search for the ancient runes, and it took awhile to find them. The Fisher Map and the McKenzie Map disagreed on the exact location by what seemed like a few hundred yards so we ended up going back and forth between the areas indicated on each chart. Our difficulties were compounded by the fact that we were craning our necks upward, expecting to see the drawings high overhead on the rock wall, but when Elissa did finally spot them they were less than two feet above the water line.

I noticed that the symbols did not seem to be as clear and crisp as they appear on many of the photos that I’d seen of them, making me wonder if they’re showing signs of weathering, or if visitors in recent years have been running fingers over them, or if the photos I’d seen had been cleaned up via photoshop or some other magic post-processing system. As it turned out, our Fisher Map showed the correct location for the pictographs, but while we were hunting for them at the location shown on the Mckenzie map we found a very nice campsite just south of the pictos where we established our first night’s camp and Elissa started our dinner.

Campfire grilled sirloin steak, fresh fried bass, corn and mashed potatoes. Who says that camping out requires roughing it? As darkness fell the mosquitos descended in droves, so we retreated to our tents to escape the swarms. Yes, I said tents, as in plural tents. Elissa claimed that during last year’s trip that my snoring was so bad that she’d almost opted for the bugs instead, and she insisted on separate tents this year. I reminded her of this as we toiled on the next day’s portage, but she countered by pointing out that my fishing tackle bag weighed far more than her extra tent.