Saturday, June 17, 2017 It rained lightly most of the night, and we packed up camp the next morning mostly wet. We made chocolate chip pancakes under my trusty CCS tundra tarp. The pancakes were only soaked in syrup and not rain thanks to Dan Cooke!

We decided we wanted to fish less along the way so we could get to Robinson earlier in the day. So we moved efficiently through some rugged portages through a couple unnamed lakes. We made a few casts in each of the lakes, but didn't see any fish at all. We descended the steep, very short portage into the small bay on the west side of Cedar Point Camp on McIntyre. We double portaged because it was so short and steep, although we single portaged otherwise (except for the portage out of Cone lake where I cleaned our trout the previous day). We caught a few small bass on soft plastics below the waterfall, and caught a few decent 16-17 inch bass on crank baits. We trolled through the bay towards McIntyre Creek with no success.

Next, we portaged around the head of McIntyre creek easily, and rode the creek until a small beaver dam before the creek heads through a narrower area where it is a bit more enclosed by steeper land on both sides. Here's where things got kind of hairy. We followed a mostly obvious portage trail for maybe 20-30 rods, but then lost the trail in some deadfall. We bushwhacked about 10 rods and found the trail again, only to lose it indefinitely maybe 20 rods later. There were orange ribbons to encourage you onward, but absolutely no sign of a trail. We continued for maybe 20-30 rods of bushwhacking and decided to just make our way back down to the creek. This proved to be a good decision, as we could pretty easily ride the creek down into Robinson. Next time I'm in this area again I won't spend as much time on the second portage and hop back into the creek after it opens back up again - maybe 30-40 rods worth of portaging.

We trolled through Robinson with no luck on our way to a 3 star campsite on a point on the western shore across from a couple small islands. The site was nice because it was on a point, but the two best tent pads were rendered useless because of the large, dead trees nearby. We used a slightly less ideal tent pad further from the dead trees. After setting up camp, we headed up the arm of the lake towards the creek that comes from the no name lake between Robinson and Ted, along which some of you have bushwhacked. My buddy caught a nice 18.5 inch smallie trolling a SR9 in gold. About 20 minutes later the lure was bit off, likely by our first pike of the trip to hook. After fishing the cove without more success for about 30 minutes we trolled back into the main lake. We were both trolling deep down husky jerks, and my friend hooked and landed our personal best lake trout on a firetiger pattern. We didn't have a tape measurer or scale, but I would guess it went 32 inches and probably 12-13 pounds. Regardless, it was a really good quality fish.

After a few more unsuccessful trolling passes we decided to switch gears and fish for smallmouth some more. I was using a jig and leech/grub and my friend was using an artificial worm. After about 20 minutes he had hooked and landed maybe 4-5 smallmouth and I had managed to hook and lose a solid smallmouth. Either way, I decided to switch over to a topwater popper since it was a pretty calm evening. The next hour was a blast, and I probably landed 10-12 quality smallmouth and one largemouth along the western shore just south of our campsite. I felt my monofilament line just above the lure and decided to retie because my line felt a bit abraded. I tested my knot, but somehow lost my lucky popper (it's made appearances in all 8 of my trips the the BWCA/Quetico) to a knot failure on the next fish. I tied on a skitter pop and had similar luck. We kept a few small smallmouth for a fish fry and headed back to camp. The flies were terrible while I cleaned the fish, but fortunately weren't bad in camp around the fire. We had another enjoyable evening around the fire and enjoyed some delicious fresh fried fish.