Saturday, May 23, 2015

I am usually the first one up, but surprisingly this morning I awoke to the sound of Wog exiting the tent. It was already 7:30am! During breakfast preparations I kept thinking to myself, "we were fishing by this time yesterday!" We all needed the rest though, so it was welcome. We had sausage and blueberry pancakes for breakfast.

After dishes we hit the water for some more fishing. Our bites were so far and few between yesterday that we really didn't dial the trout in on depth/presentation, etc. It ended up being a very tough day on the water. The wind blew hard all day long! The only wind protected spot on the lake was the shallow bay near the portage on the north end of the lake. We fished for a few hours with no luck before lunch. We decided a meal of lake trout might change our luck! We made poor man's lobster for lunch with some instant noodles. We steaked the trout and threw them in our pot of bay leaves, peppercorns, salt, and what not.
Lunch was ok. Nobody was a huge fan of the trout that way. We ate them with some melted butter and lemon juice. Trout are definitely more oily and fatty than anything else I had ever eaten. We went back out and got battered by the wind some more. We saw our second canoe today: two guys heading onward from Ram. George had lake trout hooked on 2 different occasions. Both times the trout won! Reports of the second one was that it was somewhere near 30 inches, which would have been the largest fish of the trip. Both of them both just shook off... We tried a little bit of everything, but nothing was working. These lake trout were proving to be worthy foes! We returned to camp without a fish yet on the day. Dinner was tinfoil wrapped lake trout and rainbow trout. We had just gutted and headed them, stuffed the inside with seasonings and butter. We ate the fish with some instant rice. They again were decent, but not my favorite fish. The rainbow for it's size tasted very much like salmon. We did up the dishes and hit the water again, still hoping to catch that first fish of the day. The wind was finally dying down. About an hour before dark I heard some crashing in the woods, and I told the guys that it could be a moose heading our way. About a half hour later Wog and I were fishing away, banging around making noise, when I looked over seeing George and Mike doing all kinds of silent gestures. The were shushing us and giving us the "moose antlers" hand signs. Right before the creature hit the tree line it let out 2 huge snorts. We figured we were going to see a bull moose appear. BUT, seconds later a moose head popped out of the trees and looked at us on the lake. Right after that 2 little heads popped out underneath her. A mama moose with 2 little ones was only 20 yards from us! We were silently sitting right in the middle of the bay. No one moved for the longest time as they made their way down the shoreline, sticking very close to the edge of the woods. After they left, I told the guys that even though we had not caught a fish all day, Mother Nature tipped her cap to us, by giving us a truly amazing experience!
We returned to camp, bummed we hadn't caught a fish, but amazed at the size of that moose. This was only the second moose I had ever seen in the BWCA, the first was a bull on the Dahlgren River 2 and a half years earlier. We had some hot chocolate around the fire and game planned for the next day. We were hoping the weather would cooperate so we could day trip over to Little Trout Lake.