Day three dawned with dense clouds overhead, but with no serious threat of rain. After breakfast, Grandpa and I sat by the fire pit. We read a passage from the Bible and then started in on our prayer time. I will never forget when Grandpa burst into tears as he thanked Jesus for undergoing the suffering of Calvary for his salvation. Never. I love the wilderness for many reasons, but my favorite reason by far is the complete freedom from distractions it gives me to completely place my mind on God.

We then loaded up the canoe and headed across to Devil’s Walk Bay. Don Germain had told us of a good spot for walleye in Devil’s Walk. If I had known how long of a paddle this was, I would have considered camping much closer given the way we were fishing. Grandpa seemed to be under the impression that they would be hitting topwater baits at high noon. (Bless his heart). I’m sure they would have been hitting much better at night.

We paddled through the bay and headed for Roy Lake, which Deb had told us was a fantastic bass lake. Grandpa dropped his paddle, so we had to go back and get it – always bring a spare paddle. We somehow found a small pathway through a marsh that took us to the portage landing. The portage was overgrown and it would have been difficult to get a canoe over it. We walked the portage and braved some buggy conditions while I took a few casts from shore. A fish grabbed my lure but I failed to set the hook properly and it got away. After some minor trouble turning the canoe around, we headed back to troll our spot in the bay again. After no success, we decided to fish the shoreline on the way out. We were set up with bobbers and leeches again.

Grandpa soon landed a nice sized bass, quite a bit bigger than the one I had caught yesterday. He was happy as a clam and said it was one of the biggest bass he’d ever caught. I was jealous, so we trolled the shoreline again. Another bass hit my lure and missed. We turned around the canoe for a second pass, and he hit and missed again. I turned to Grandpa and said, “That fish is on my plate tonight.” Pass three produced no hits. On the fourth pass he hit and missed again. I waited. He hit again. I hooked him on the third hit and pulled him in – another bass, just a tad fatter than Grandpa’s. We got him on the stringer and headed back for camp.

Neither of us had eaten any lunch other than a Clif bar or two, but the wilderness has a way of reducing life to its simplest terms, as both Thoreau and Sigurd Olson have emphasized. We decided to wait for dinner to eat, so after filleting the fish (and cutting his finger again, thankfully not a bad cut), Dinner that night was chicken wild rice soup, cooked with my new stove which screwed onto a can of Coleman gas (the brand name fails me at the moment). It was delicious and went well with our fish fillets, which again turned out great except for the fattest one, which Grandpa commented was a little like sushi. We got dinner all cleaned up.

Grandpa sat in camp for a while, and I bush whacked around Englishman Island for a while to take some pictures. It was a lovely evening, so as the sun was setting the two of us headed out to check out another fishing spot on the shoreline just northwest of our camp site. The lake was calm as glass, and with the Ross light hitting the red pines I couldn’t have asked for a better evening. Grandpa got a soft hit at one point (probably a walleye) but otherwise we were skunked. We headed back to our campsite and hit the hay after a long and satisfying day.