Friday, June 29, 2012

We rose pre-sunrise to take another gravel-road look for a moose, failed to find one, and headed down the Gunflint Trail towards Grand Marais. Two-thirds of the way down the trail guess what was standing in a meadow not 50 feet from the road:

Yes, we were the dumb tourists with a rental car pulled off the side of the road taking pictures of a pair of silly moose! This checked off a goal for Elissa, who counted this encounter as one of the highlights of her entire trip, along with not having to share a tent with her (allegedly) snore-prone dad. And yes, we know that a cow moose can be very dangerous when her calf is nearby, Elissa was not as near the animals as it appeared!

We left the moose family behind, picked up donuts and a customs clearance in Grand Marais (both of which took about the same amount of time) and continued along the lake to Duluth where, with a couple of hours until our flight out, we spent an hour at the Great Lakes Aquarium where we saw the only lake trout that we encountered on our entire trip, and the only antlered moose.

And thus ended our trip.

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A few random thoughts in summary:

What a wonderful trip! Elissa makes a great paddling, camping and fishing partner. (Except for her wild accusations about my snoring)

We made this trip in June, thinking that we'd see better fishing, but it did not pan out as we'd hoped. The fishing was tougher (at least for us) this year in June than it was last year in July. We caught quite a few fish this year, but had to work hard for what we caught. We understand that every season is different and were not in any way disappointed with the fishing, except maybe for not being able to catch any lake trout this year. The biggest differences in the fishing were with the bass. They really, really got slow mid- day, much more so than last year, and they were scattered so that we almost always caught them singly. I can only remember one time this year that a second fish followed a hooked bass to the boat. Last year we'd sometimes see three or four fish following a hooked bass.

The bugs were about the same this year as last. Mosquitos were thick in the evenings and moderate in the mornings and on the portage trails. There were a few more black flies this year than last, but they really only bothered us on a couple of afternoons when there might be three or four buzzing around our ankles in the canoe. We saw far fewer deer flies this year, maybe only one or two the entire trip. We did encounter more ticks this year, probably finding three or four each day on clothing or tents, but only one of them managed to attach.

At the risk of commercializing this post, I do want to again compliment Debbie Mark and her staff at Seagull Outfitters. They took exceptionally good care of us both this year and last and I have no hesitation in recommending their services.