Moving time again, as Veron is the goal, and we want to spend at least two nights there. We fish our way south out of Camel, finding a couple of hot spots that warrant our attention, but we see a large 8-man canoe coming down from the narrows, so we decide to stay ahead of them, knowing that there is really only one good camp on Veron that I know about. This is not a very heavily travelled area of the park, and the portage out of Camel is an honest challenge with some vertical at the north end. There is a very short section of creek paddling and then you’re on a short portage into a no-name lake. The no-namer has a short portage out of it, which we found, but never really think that we found the proper take out for it. From there, it’s a short hop (paddle then portage again) into the northern end of Veron. Finally here, we celebrate that this is the “deepest” that we’ve probably ever been in the park (eastern Conmee is probably a close second). We’ve wanted to fish the fabled waters of Veron for several years, so rods get rigged and it’s off we go.

Just after starting, an incident: I am sitting in the duffer seat, just ahead of Brett, and I suddenly feel a slap to my face followed by a pretty sharp pain in my lip. Blood starts to trickle down my face when I am wondering what happened. There is a jig and grub hooked through my lip, and when Brett had cast his crankbait, he caught the jig of his other pole and it flung forward into my mouth. It’s shocking, of course, and I ask Greg to turn around from his bow seat and tell me how bad it looks. “Pretty bad” is his response. Now, Greg and I are both dentists, and he does a lot of oral surgery, so I feel like I am glad he’s here. We get to shore as I am trying to manage the bleeding as best I can. Brett, of course, feels terrible, and wants to help out however he can. The hook is coming from the outside and the point of the hook is not visible, although I can feel the point almost through the muscle of my lower lip. Even with the barb bent down, it’s pretty stuck. I have Greg push on the head to pop it though the rest of the way, but some cutting with a fillet knife (and some whiskey) is required to get it through. We are then able to clip the shank and it is out. We have a suture kit, but it’s small enough not to require any stitches. I am mostly thankful that, despite a fat lip and some bruising, this is not a “trip-ender” and when you think about other things that could have occurred, it ends up being not so bad. This is just another one of those reminders to constantly have your sunglasses or glasses of some type on, because you just never know…

After all of that excitement, we hear voices, and the large war wagon canoe has nearly caught up to us. It’s back in the canoe, fishing rods away, and we hightail it for the midlake island camp that I know about. We pull in to find it open, and some weeds growing in the firepit let us know that we are the first ones here for the year. As we’re unloading, we have a very cool wildlife encounter—a mother mink swims out in front of the campsite with one of her pups in her mouth. She swims around the island out of view, drops the pup, and then returns to the other side. This repeats three times, and we must have beached a little too close to wherever her den was. We were watching her swim, half-expecting that a large pike was going to make a lunge from the depths somewhere. The large canoe passes by, and heads towards Delahey.

As we set up, the sun is gone and a cold wind is starting to blow in from the east/northeast. You can feel the temp drop as a front is moving in, and we fish some likely spots for walleyes, picking up one here and there, but not with any pattern. It’s getting downright cold now, and unfortunately the site is situated such that the fire pit is on the exposed east end, taking the brunt of the wind. We set up two tarps as windbreaks, and a cold drizzle starts. [URL=http://s75.photobucket.com/user/MadBirdman/media/Quetico%202016%20Veron/Campfire_zpseti5jke9.jpg.html]

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