Monday, June 15, 2015

Up early and off to explore Argo! We opted to take the 213 rod portage into the SE corner of Argo because it was a much shorter trip from our campsite, even though we were warned against it. The portage starts with a relatively easy 30 rod hike ending in a huge beaver damn which covers the trail. The beaver pond is about 1/4 to 1/3 of a mile long, and must be paddled, no going around it. It is a mess of hummocks and dead, fallen trees. The portage continues at the far north end, but you must paddle around the east side. The west side is a dead end. (It took an hour to figure this out) The last 120 rods or so is overgrown, brush, and buggy, but not TOO bad. We were greeted with high winds on Argo, which kept us in the SE corner of the lake. We trolled around for a couple of hours and caught 6 or so trout. Lots of smallmouth close to shore. We cooked a great shore lunch on the island just north of the 213 rod portage, and caught several more trout from shore.

We had great walleye action on the Canadian side of Crooked trolling our way way back to camp. Little did we know the fishing on the Canadian side would only get better. Back at camp, we walked up on a turtle laying eggs in front of my hammock. This would continue for the rest of our stay. We also had an eagle follow us all the way from the Argo portage, and grabbed our fish guts from about 10 feet away. We would see him off and on for the rest of our stay on Crooked. We cooked one more meal of bacon wrapped walleyes for dinner, and spent the evening fishing from shore.