Saturday, July 19, 2014 Another beautiful morning! Had the pleasure of surprising a raccoon that had ventured in to my campsite. They're fun critters. Started the day with the 240 rod portage out of the south end of the lake, and it was in very good shape. Just long. The next portage, in to Weird, was a little tricky. There is a beaver dam slightly above the portage landing, and I found the safest thing to do was to unload above it and walk the canoe over. So I actually unloaded, loaded, and unloaded in the course of about fifty yards. Better safe than sorry, and it's not like I'm carrying hundreds of pounds of gear. I travel with one large Duluth pack, and a small food pack and fanny pack, so not too much. My fishing rod and spare paddle stay lashed to the thwarts until needed, so they are no trouble while traveling. I quietly paddled through Jack Lake, as I was hoping to see a moose. Seems like moose sightings have become almost routine on this stretch, but I wasn't so fortunate. On the 72 rod portage in to the Temperance River I ran in to a family of five from the twin cities, including kids of probably 15, 12, and 10 years old. They commented about how cool they thought it was that I was soloing, and I commended them for exposing their kids to the beautiful BWCA. They were heading up to South Temperance, and I hope they got that great campsite I had vacated hours earlier. At this point of the trip, I did drag my raingear out, put it on, and took it off ten minutes later. This was the only rain of my trip, fortunately. I paddled down in to Kelly, and finished my traveling for the day with the 230 rod portage in to Burnt. Again, as with the 240 rod portage earlier in the day, this one was in excellent shape but did have a little slope to it and a couple of large downed trees across the path. Really no trouble at all, especially at this stage of my trip. I was grizzled by now! I paddled in to Burnt with the idea that I would camp on the Northwest side of the lake to take advantage of the nice breeze coming out of the South. On my way over I decided to paddle by the swampy island campsite, and was saddened to see the condition of the site. Some people have no idea what it means to peacefully coexist on this earth with other humans. There was food packaging, string, rope, a broken paddle, and chunks of rotten birch just strewn about the area. This was the first campsite I ever stayed at by myself in the boundary waters, a few years ago on my inaugural solo trip, and to see it in this shape was a real downer. But I trudged on, and got the nice site on the point at the North side of the lake. There were a couple of fellas out fishing when I arrived on that side of the lake and they showed a nice stringer of walleyes. I set up camp, relaxed a little, went out to center lake for some water filtering, and then enjoyed some fishing success myself. I managed to catch two nice walleyes, probably 18", on a diving shad rap. I retired early again, same reason as above! It looked like it could storm a bit, but nothing ever developed.