Friday, August 15, 2014 A 5:30 wake-up call had us on the water around 7 AM, and we began the trek back south with hopes of securing a site on the south end of Kelly Lake. The 240 rod portage, Weird Lake and Jack Lake passed by quickly. We did take some time to go find the mine entrance near the portage from Jack into Kelly Lake. It was much larger than I expected and proved to be just the diversion we needed before finishing up the last bit of paddling. When we arrived in Kelly Lake, we ran into 2 families fishing below the stream where it entered the lake. They informed us that all the sites in the lower part of the lake were already full, so we unhappily took the site on the north end of the lake. Despite its sloping and/or rocky tent pads and the 30 minute paddle against the wind through a seemingly unending (but beautiful) lily pad field to get to the rest of the lake to fish, we made due as our only other alternative was to push onto Peterson Lake or head out of the BW one day earlier than expected. We had camp set up for an early lunch and then headed out to fish. Curt stayed behind to fish close to camp and to rest a little, and this turned out to be the best choice of the trip. He got into the walleye, and surprised us with a stringer of 5 nice fish when we returned from fishing other areas of the lake. We added 2 smallmouth to his take and finally had our first "large" dinner of the trip on our last night. It was a well deserved ending to an otherwise frustrating week of fishing. Curt finally gave out his newfound fishing secrets after dinner and both Tyler and I were able to catch a walleye and miss several others (Tyler's first BW walleye!). Tyler also hooked into what was likely a very large northern pike, that literally tore his reel in half when it went on an unexpected run. With his reel completely broken, Tyler tried to haul in the fish by hand, but he lost tension on the line and it got away. He was pretty upset about the broken reel, but it was definitely the highlight of his trip in terms of fishing and imagining what must have been down there to do that to his reel. With our trip home looming the next morning, we went to bed well before dark to get some rest. Our time in the wilderness was coming to a close.