Sunday, June 11, 2006. Mostly sunny with temps in the low 70s.

Rising early the next morning, we packed up camp. Our plan was to cross the portage into Conk Lake, drop off our gear on the shore and do some fishing. Once on Conk, we located a nice campsite on the north side of the lake and unloaded. Conk is a small lake that just looks fishy. And it is. We trolled its entire shoreline in an hour or two, picking up a number of nice smallmouth on the eastern end in the 16”-17” range while Matt and Zach got into some good walleye action on the western end.

We fished our way back to our gear dump. Once on shore, we prepared a bacon and eggs brunch. While the rest of us relaxed, Zach landed a nice 20” smallmouth right off shore in front of the campsite. After snapping a picture of Zach’s catch, we loaded up our gear onto the canoes and headed towards the 30 rod portage into Jean Lake.

Jean is a good sized body of water and much time could be spent exploring her bays and islands. We unfortunately didn’t have time. We worked our way up along the north shore of the lake trying to stay out of the wind which was again in our faces. Eventually we made the turn south through the narrows. We continued on to the southern end of the lake and settled on a campsite just southwest of the portage into Burntside Lake, our destination for the following afternoon.

After camp was setup and we had some dinner, we headed out to fish. We caught a number of 19” and 20” walleyes along the western shoreline, as well as some small but feisty smallmouth and very aggressive hammer handles. Barley had a large northern on, but got bit off. That night we sat around a campfire and discussed our plans for the next day and eventually crawled into our tents for the night.