This was going to be a layover day, and it was just that. I made the decision that I wasn't going to paddle up to Adams or down the Louse River to Trail Lake since I had lost more than a day on the first leg of my trip. I lazed around camp and made breakfast - a bacon omelet using Ovaeasy egg crystals and bacon bits, and a pan of fried cornbread. I had packed some mini-moos as they don't need to be refrigerated so it was pretty simple to use the 1/2 & 1/2 as a milk substitute in the cornbread. I also had some ghee that I used for both the omelet and the cornbread. Those Ovaeasy egg crystals are a great product, they tasted just like the real thing!

I cleaned up after breakfast and saw that there was weather moving in. I made sure everything was secure and went into my tent as the dark, low wall of clouds barreled in from the west. The storm hit suddenly with strong winds (at one point I thought the tent might collapse) and then thunder, lightning and a torrential downpour. I was glad I had staked out the tent and the guy lines, and was extra glad that I had spent so much effort waterproofing my old tent before I left for this trip.

Eventually, the storm passed and it tuned into a pretty decent day. I decided to try a little fishing so I went out in the canoe and fished the current where the Louse River empties into Malberg. That was just south of my campsite so I didn't have far to travel. The river was really running from all the rain of the past few days so it looked promising. I caught a nice eater-size walleye on a jig and leech, and then a BIG bull of a sunnie. It was by far the biggest sunnie I'd ever caught. I figured that it would make a nice dinner along with the walleye so I put it on the stringer. I made repeated drifts over the place where I caught the sunfish and hooked a couple more - both huge! They seemed to be locked into a pretty tight 25' x 25' area just next to a weed bed. They were also pretty good at stripping the bait from my jig.

I was pretty cautious with the fishing as this was first time I'd fished solo from a canoe, and I never got too far from camp. I always remembered that there was no one around for help if anything should happen to me.

I didn't fish for too long, but before I quit I hooked a smallie, about a pound and a half, so nothing huge, but I realized that I had caught northerns, a walleye, sunfish and a smallie - sort of a Malberg grand slam.

I had a bald eagle visit camp, perching on a tree just a few feet away from where the two fish were sitting on the stringer. I eventually put a Crazy Creek chair over the stringered fish to keep the baldie from grabbing them, and he soon lost interest and flew away to the other side of the lake.

I did some unsuccessful fishing from shore and then made a dinner of fried fish. I coated the fish in townhouse cracker crumbs and fried them in ghee. They were very tasty. I cleaned up from dinner and, as was my pattern for this trip, retired early before the skeets got too bad.