Day 6 Sturgeon Lake: Skies were overcast as we ate our breakfast of pancakes, and wind was now north/northeast and gaining a bit of intensity. The plan was to fish a narrows northeast of camp that had provided excellent walleye action on trips past. We packed up lunch, and headed east into the breeze. We switched partners again, and this time I fished with Bill. We hit some fishy looking points and islands as we moved east, and Bill picked up bass, walleye, and pike on nearly consecutive casts with the same bait. I wasn’t able to fish much as the increasing wind made boat control a challenge. Just as we were ready to move to the narrows, the north wind intensified, and we were looking out at whitecaps that were rolling down from the large north bay of Sturgeon (just east of Walsh Lake). Large, stinging drops of sideways rain accompanied the wind, and we dug in hard as we island hopped across the opening. It was raining so hard that I had to keep my left eye closed as I paddled because it was getting so much rain in it. I was actually wishing I had a pirate’s eye patch to keep my raincoat’s hood from flapping me in the eyelid! We took short quick strokes on the leeward side of the canoe and angled upwind to a point where we could finally swing the bow around to point our desired direction. This tacking was necessary but added time and distance to our trek. We rested in the lee of each small island we came to, as the wind howled. The gusts, reaching over 40mph we guessed, were strong enough that they bent the tallest trees (and their accumulated rainfall) over us, and we had to move a bit to avoid getting caught under a “showerhead”. Onward we moved to the fishing spot, and we fished an hour or so, until we needed a break from the elements. We landed at a campsite there, and were able to coax a fire from the waterlogged wood that we found there. We ate our lunch thinking: “this can’t possibly continue like this all day, can it?” Everything I was wearing was now soaked, and I could feel some shivers. We heated up small rocks in the fire, and put them in our pockets to get our core warmed up a bit. Would have been nice to have brought my stove so we could at least have some hot soup or tea, but all of our cooking stuff was back at our site, some two miles away. Two more hours went by as the storm raged and we hung tight near our smoky fire. When the wind let up a tiny bit, we decided that it was time to get our muscles moving (and the heat generated from it) by working our way back to camp. We played the game of paddle upwind—tack—surf downwind—hide behind island—repeat as we struggled onwards. We took waves over the gunwhale on at least two occasions, and were sitting in a good inch of bilge. We got to our site (Salvation!) and fired up the JetBoils for some hot tea, soup and cocoa. We hunkered under the tarps for any shelter we could get.

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We got into our tents, stripped off our wet clothing, and layered up with dry clothes, before zipping into our sleeping bags. I was feeling hypothermia, and experienced the weird feeling of things seeming to “slow down” mentally. The storm continued to rage, as I fell asleep. When I woke, I was completely disoriented: was it still evening? I noticed the wind had died down, and heard someone out in the cooking area making a fire. Brett had gotten up and taken some excellent pictures of a rainbow that formed, finally marking the end of the storm.

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I was still shivering, so I grabbed the Sven saw and started sawing logs to both create firewood and warm myself up. The fire that had hit this island had made for no shortage of dead wood, at least. One by one, the rest of the guys got up and we ate our dinner of fish chowder, thankful that the day (and storm) were behind us.