Sunshine and a light breeze greeted us this morning. We took the opportunity to lay out every piece of wet gear to dry, making our site look like a northwoods rummage sale.

[URL=http://s75.photobucket.com/user/MadBirdman/media/Quetico%202014/quetico2014053_zps24c22256.jpg.html]

[/URL]

It hurt to lose a whole day of fishing like that, since we knew we had to start working our way out now. We packed up camp as soon as our stuff had dried out a bit, and fished our way west along the north shore of Sturgeon. The post front conditions slowed things down a bit, but we found some decent smallies on beds and a few walleyes.

[URL=http://s75.photobucket.com/user/MadBirdman/media/Quetico%202014/IMG_0965_zpsf2aa4098.jpg.html]

[/URL]

We hit the mouth of Jean Creek, and saw that the nice campsite on the western shore near there was occupied, although the residents weren’t home. They had a nice setup with three tents and a bug house. I picked up a decent walleye and pike as I trolled through the area dragging a #5 Mepps spinner, and Steve and I caught a few more walleyes and bass in the creek mouth. I would have liked to have a few more hours to work that area over, but we knew we had to get back downstream to Tanner Lake in order to make our pickup the next morning. The river now was even more full, pregnant with the rains of the big storm the day before. The extra water made paddling downstream possible with substantially less effort, although riffles needed to be negotiated properly by ruddering away from boulders and logs. The power of the moving water made for some interesting eddy currents, and you had to concentrate to make sure you didn’t get pointed in the wrong direction. We stopped for lunch on a different portage, and made it from Sturgeon to where Poohbah Creek splits off in just an hour and a half this time—a full 3.5 hours less than the other direction. We took a Tanner Lake camp near the portage (Tanner Rapids), and rigged up for one more night of fishing. Brett and I caught three walleyes in the current (enough for dinner), and then went to hit some of the southern bays to try for smallies. Some topwater blowups on my Chug Bug and Skitter Pop kept us entertained for awhile, but the bugs were coming out with a vengeance. We headed back to our last campfire of the trip.

[URL=http://s75.photobucket.com/user/MadBirdman/media/Quetico%202014/IMG_0974_zps8c2374c0.jpg.html]

[/URL]

[URL=http://s75.photobucket.com/user/MadBirdman/media/Quetico%202014/IMG_0976_zpsc5249868.jpg.html]

[/URL]