Friday, August 01, 2014 6am Alarm, no sleeping in today. I wanted to seize every moment of the last day in this sanctuary. I went right to the stove to start making coffee and realized there was heavy mist on the water this morning and the sun was just beginning to break through. I grabbed the camera to snap a couple of quick shots. I had to pump water to make the coffee so I grabbed the pump and headed down to where the canoe was. The fishing poles were right there leaning on the canoe with lures already set up on them so I grabbed a pole with a big lipped shad and threw a couple casts right off shore into the rocks and cranked it back. Third cast BAM! Not a few feet from the shore a big northern took the lure! I landed him pretty quickly for his size, but had no glove, no pliers and my fishing bag was up by the tent. I sprinted up the hill to grab my pliers and glove and Carly is just coming out of the tent, sees me running full speed and thinks "BEAR" and grabs the bear mace asking me whats wrong....All I can say half out of breath as I do a 180 with glove and pliers in hand is "FISH....BIG FISH"! Got back in seconds, removed the lure while Carly got the camera out for a pic, and thats the story of the biggest fish I have caught so far! He was released and swam off just fine. Carly wanted to keep it, but I was hoping for Walleye, so he got a free pass. What an awesome way to start the day!

We knew we had to leave today, so we got things packed up pretty quickly after breakfast. Our plan was to paddle about 6 hours up the Horse River into Fourtown and set up camp there for our last night.

To this point I haven't mentioned much about bugs. Here's why: I treated all of our clothing and gear with the Sawyer Permethrin Spray stuff. I also carried a Thermacell which, by the way, placed strategically next to the latrine 10 minutes prior to use makes for a MUCH more comfortable visit! I swear by it's effectiveness! We used 100% deet for cuffs and stuff and OTB Abyss shoes to help keep out leeches and stuff. My partner experienced a couple of bad nights on her legs, but they were tight fitting and thin material. Lesson learned for next trip. So bug report for the whole trip...loads of mosquitoes at dusk and dawn, otherwise not too bad. Horse flies on horse river were pretty annoying, glad I had a hat and head net.

I think we broke camp by 8:30 and were on our way. We paddled up the Horse River which proved to be way more of a challenge than we were anticipating. There are 3 or 4 portages along the river which make for a lot of loading and unloading time. But even worse were the 6 or 8 set of rapids that had no portage. We had to wade through ankle to knee deep rapids on slippery rocks guiding the canoe along. It was also a time consuming process. By the time we got out of the river and into Horse lake we were already much later than we wanted to be. I think it had to be 4 or 5. We paddled all of Horse Lake only to find every campsite was taken. We found the portage over to Fourtown Lake where we met 2 other groups of travelers that we in a similar situation. They were all in search of a site. We were the slowest since we were tired and least experienced so those two groups moved ahead of us into Fourtown. There were more rapids involved here to add to our exhaustion and frustration. We made it into Fourtown and saw that one of the groups had gotten the first site right at the entrance to the lake. We felt optimistic. We paddled north only to find all sites taken. We crossed over to the West side and past every campsite that was take, we kept on South and found no campsites. We practically paddled every inch of Fourtown and never found a site. We had one nice couple offer to share their site with us, but we still have 4 more site to check on the lake and we were certain we would get one. Nope. We happened across a larger group, 2 families camping together that occupied 2 sites adjacent to one another. They offered for us to come and share with them. They showed us a rebel site which was next to theirs. Had a fire ring and just enough space for a small tent. By now, we had been paddling about 11 hours and decided that this would have to do. Totally exhausted we unload the canoe and begin to set up the tent at around 9. Despite the rough day, we were sad that tomorrow we would be paddling our way out of the wilderness. This site offered some firsts on our trip. We had a Western view so as we were getting things set up we had a beautiful sunset. We also had the company of a beaver who paddled around the front of our camp for quite some time.

I had determined that we needed 5 hours to get where we were going and we were being picked up at 3:00 so we planned to leave camp the next morning by 10am

We made a fire for a short while then gazed in sheer amazement at the sky with more stars than could even be imagined.