Some splotchy sunlight greets us the next morning, as it seems the rain has passed, but a chill still hangs in the air. I get some coffee going and fire up one of our favorite breakfasts—Quetico burritos! Before the trip, I had scrambled a dozen eggs, and combined them with chopped peppers and onions. I add some seasoned salt and pepper, and into a 1L lexan bottle they go. I freeze them solid and put them at the bottom of our food pack, near the other cold items. By this morning, they are thawed out and ready to go. A tube of frozen-hard breakfast sausage gets cooked too, and we grate some gouda into the cooked eggs and put them in large tortillas. Hearty and good.

Today we get to fish Brent and work over some spots that look to be producers. The Quetico wind machine, however, has picked up and is blowing some cold air in from the west. This, of course, is directly in our faces as we work our way westward to hit several of the fishy-looking narrows. We get into a quick drift-fishing pattern jigging for walleyes, but the wind is blowing hard enough that we are obligated to use heavier jigs than we’d like to get to the bottom, and then snags are abundant on the rocky bottom. It becomes a game, where you’d either catch a fish or the bottom on each pass, but it grows somewhat tiresome as the strikes get fewer and further between. Seems like a good time to stop for lunch, and it always feels good to stretch your legs and walk around a bit. In the afternoon, we let the wind blow us back towards home hitting some islands and points along the way. Now we aren’t catching really anything consistently—a walleye here and there, but nothing sustainable. Greg and I duck southward into a decent-sized bay, and it feels good to get out of the wind if nothing else. We find some shallower water back there, and grass, and there are the predictable hammer-handle northern pike to tear into our offerings. Some very bassy-looking territory provided some action too, but not really enough to keep us there for too long. A 20” pike broke off one of my favorite Rapala’s—but that’s the risk you take fishing that type of structure without a steel leader. Back out to the middle body of the lake, and in the distance we see two canoes moving to the southeast—the first boats we’d seen in a couple of days. We gave some other spots in our vicinity a good working-over, including some unsuccessful trolling for lakers in the large basin south of our camp, but the fishing just wasn’t “on” on this chilly day. Heavier clouds rolled in over the afternoon and evening, and back to camp we went to put on another layer to ward off the chill. After dinner, some sunlight popped though the clouds, shining on the south shore of the basin, illuminating the new growth that is coming along after an obvious fire some years ago.

We start “prepacking” since we are leaving tomorrow morning, and decide we will move as soon as we can get going.