Day 3: Monday, Sept 24

I was glad to see the wind abated a bit during the night, and the day broke cold but very clear. Our frozen scrambled eggs/veggies mixture had thawed enough to finally eat, so we gorged ourselves on breakfast burritos and sausage served with cranberry scones and coffee.

We struck camp and decided to fish our way out. We hit the mid-lake reefs in the main body of Jean on our way westward, but still only caught smallmouth. Entertaining, but not exactly what we were after. We saw the same pair of guys from Day 1 camped at the site in the narrows of Jean where the rest of the lake opens to the south (and you can head further west into Little Jean). The day was a beauty, and we geared up to troll for lakers after a short break.

There is a very high cliff that watches over the western shore of that large southern bay, and as we fished past it, my depth finder was marking depths of well over 100 feet, just 20 yards from shore. It was a really neat spot. I tied on my trusty Deep TailDancer in the purpledescent color, and it wasn’t too long before my rod doubled over, and I met up with this nice laker.

A few more fall colors were popping out along the southern shore, and with the bluebird conditions and cold nights, I thought we were really going to hit peak colors during our week in the park.
We were getting hungry for lunch, so we decided to push on, since that was the only laker we landed. The landing to the Burntside portage on the Jean side is not the greatest (fairly steep rock face without a lot of great canoe landing options), but the carry is easy, and soon we got our first glimpse of island-studded Burntside as some puffy cumulous clouds gathered.
We saw noone on the lake, and headed to the large island campsite (PCD #FA ) for lunch. In my opinion, it’s a dandy, with good pine duff, mature white and red pines, and is open and airy. It also features a “livewell”, good canoe landings and a nice rock wall firepit.

Burntside is my kind of lake: not too big, but still big and deep enough to get all four species, lots of islands and emergent structure to hit, where you can get out of the wind if you’d like. To be fair, any lake up there would have looked its best on a day like that, though.

After lunch, camp was quickly set, and we decided to split the three boats up to explore different areas of the lake, with walleye on our minds. Greg and I worked over the midlake island grouping thoroughly, and could not believe that waldo’s were not to be had on all of this fishy looking structure. We found several nice rock humps on the backside of the islands, but…nothing.

To shake things up a bit, we trolled over to the narrows where the two bodies of Burntside meet, and did get into some nice smallies and pike by throwing jigs tipped with Gulp and Rapalas along the weed edges.

We headed through the narrows into western Burntside, but only got into there a bit as we were fast losing daylight. The shorter days really were noticeable: it was only 6:45pm and our fishing was nearly done.

As we paddled back to the site, we met up with Brett and Steve’s canoe, who hadn’t had any luck finding walleyes either. As we were talking and drifting in, Steve threw a few casts with a long crankbait, and something big grabbed it. Since I had the camera, we stayed with them and after a few minutes, he landed this nice pike:

 
It went 35” inches and was pretty fat, so that was a nice way to end our fishing day. The last of our fresh meat was to be enjoyed that night, so we got into some food prep and another box of wine. I sautéed green peppers and mushrooms in ghee, as Greg grilled some New York strips. The warm fire sure felt good as the temperature dropped for the evening.

Pete and Brian were stumped on where the walleyes were as well, and we vowed to switch tactics until we could at least get into some. It got pretty cold again that night (into the 20’s) but the wind really laid down nicely overnight. I had purchased a sleeping bag liner to add an extra measure of warmth to my down sleeping bag, and it was proving its worth on this trip.