Friday, September 13, 2013

The third day started with a big breakfast. Pancakes, oatmeal, dried fruit. We had decided to do a day trip over to Stuart Lake. We had never been there before, but knew we had a little bit of a hike to get over there. We left camp early and hit our first portage very early. Little did I know this would be the most enjoyable portage of the day. The portages from Agnes to get over to Stuart are pretty awesome! By awesome, I mean fairly long and uphill both ways, They hadn't been used much, so there were a lot of trees in the path and that made the trek a little tougher. We made our way through the Dahlgren River, which on a drier year could be problematic. It is a very small and shallow river. When we about halfway down the river my dad started hollering and pointing ahead of us... We finally saw what he had spotted! A HUGE BULL MOOSE! I frantically grabbed the camera and stood up to get a picture, just then the moose turned and looked at us and I remembered we were in a river that was only about four feet wide... I snapped a few pics as he stepped in front of a huge evergreen, which successfully made the pictures very tough to make him out in. It was quite a neat experience, as when he finally decided to leave he disappeared in about 3 bounds.

We finally made it to Stuart Lake! The 2 canoes went their separate ways (later I was scolded by my father for not communicating where we were headed...) "George" and I were on a mission: We were headed to the falls on the other side of the lake. From what I had read and heard, the fishing was pretty good right out in front of the waterfall. After an hour of fishing our way to the waterfall, we found it. We stepped out of the canoe and started casting jigs, and it wasn't long before I had hooked a beautiful gold and black walleye. We caught a few, snapped some pictures and then decided we should go find the other canoe. We ran into them halfway across the lake and they were eager to tell us the had been catching walleyes like crazy too! We then realized we both had stringers of wallyes... We were gonna eat good tonight! We headed back to where they had been fishing which was much closer to the portage and proceeded to catch walleye after walleye! I had head reports of Stuart being an excellent walleye lake, and it sure did not disappoint! My dad caught the nicest one of the day, shortly before we decided to head back. We cleaned our mess of fish and headed back! We ate and ate and ate that night for dinner and all headed to bed pretty early after the long journey of the day.