Sunday, June 17, 2012

After a good breakfast at Brittons, which has also become our custom, we go back to CCO to get our gear, check out and have a final chat with the outfitter about fishing and the weather. He is kind enough to pull up a weather report on his laptop for us, and it is just what we had feared: much rain predicted for the week.

Most irritatingly, it shows things clearing up on thursday and becoming nice after that, but that is the day we have to leave. But although the three full days we will be there are predicted to be all rain, at least our travel days in and out are supposed to be clear. (we have to leave one day earlier than usual, since my brother needs to be back home by friday night) I am amazed that in spite of a leisurely breakfast, final packing, the drive out to Snowbank Lake E.P., unloading the car and loading the canoe, we are still officially on our way before 8:00 a.m. !! Hooray!

I make the first use of the timer function and the camera tripod I bought for this trip.

We make our way across Snowbank with no trouble; although there is a bit of wind it is at our back and poses no problem. And it is only one portage in to our basecamp lake so we don't mind doing a triple portage.

My brother Ken with what is undoubtedly the largest rod tube the bwca has ever seen.

Our concerns about finding a campsite prove unfounded as the lake appears to be completely empty! We pass a few canoes on their way out, but every campsite we pass is deserted. We check out a few that had been highly rated on this site, but decide in each case to press on and look at the next one. We can always come back if the ones in front of us are full. We finally decide on the one at the southeast end of the lake, it is very open and has a couple of food hanging trees. We don't check out the north end of the lake, but we are very surprised to find that as far as we can tell, we have the entire southern leg of the lake to ourselves. On a weekend. At one of the most used entry points. In mid-June. Strange...

looking out over Disappointment Lake from our new home for the week.

We get to work setting up the tarp, and right away I get into trouble. In order to tie a rope to a tree I stand on a boulder so I can get higher up. That boulder rolls out from under me like it was a ball bearing, and I end up horizontal in the air and fall right on top of the boulder with the small of my back. My fear of being paralyzed proves unfounded, and the only price for a lesson learned is a sore back. Luckily I can give it a rest by laying on the couch all week... Oh, wait, I'll be spending about ten hours a day in a canoe seat turning back and forth to cast and paddle... Oh well. After setting up the rest of camp without incident, the day is still young so we go out on the lake to finally get in some fishing.

As usual, I pose with my first fish of the trip:

This fish is typical of the size of most of the fish we will catch this week. And oddly enough great numbers of them will be hooked in a similar way.

After catching some more tiny smallmouth and a hammer handle northern, we head back to camp to have our italian sausage dinner and enjoy a quiet evening relaxing.

We try shore fishing in the evening, but with no luck. I don't think we caught a single thing from camp all week. As a side note, the largest tree in this photo is where a bald eagle would spend a lot of his time while we were there. It seemed almost every time we looked, there he was sitting in his tree.