Day 6: Thursday, Sept 27th

Another day, another pretty morning with the fog and mist raising over the lake.

(Aside: sorry for all of the scenery shots, but I just couldn’t help myself).
We hadn’t seen anyone for a couple of days, and we paddled towards Eden Island in the morning sun. One definite perk of fall tripping is that all of these primo sites which are right on the “main drag” were open. We took the mainland point site facing the beach (PCD #3Y). 
After lazing around, napping in the sun on the rocks, and cleaning ourselves up, we headed out to see the picto’s and fish Quetico hard. Some mergansers were there to see us off as we headed out.
Pete and I fished together today, and we checked out the cliffs holding the Quetico Lake pictographs, finding the two displays in this area.

We didn’t paddle northeast to the third set, since Brett and Steve were up there already and we were still fanning out to hopefully find some better fishing. We moved up the narrows into the small bay leading to the portage to Cirrus, hoping to find some walleyes in the current, but again came up empty. The water level was low in the narrows and we had to line the canoe through there. We worked over the entire small bay, and then the area where the rapids dump in from Cirrus. A couple of small pike, and that was it. The weather had turned warm enough that we were paddling in short sleeve shirts, a first for the week. We paddled back to the main lake where we met up with Brett and Steve. They didn’t have much better luck than we did, even trolling the channel for lakers. As our two boats paddled back towards camp, Brett noticed something large swimming in the water. It was a young bull moose swimming the bay just north of our site, and we paddled up quietly as I got my zoom lens out. He was a young bull, and still had a fairly undeveloped antler rack, but he was good-sized, as we saw as he got to shore.

He got to shore and clambered noisily over the rocks and into the woods, and we celebrated our closest encounter with a moose in all of our trips into the park. He was just a huge, magnificent animal.

Back in camp, the group bemoaned the slow fishing on Quetico Lake and even though we loved our site, decided to throw a “Hail Mary” on our last day in the park and move to Beaverhouse Lake tomorrow.