Awake at 1:00 am and traveling in the dark at 2:30 am. I knew last night’s negotiation left me with a more difficult navigation duty coming up. Crooked Lake will be a lot tougher to traverse in the pitch black now. Launching into southwesterly winds, I needed to concentrate on paddling as the waves grew larger as we traveled east out in the middle of Sunday Bay of Crooked Lake. But as we near the opposite side of Sunday Bay, I needed to navigate through a tricky area without error. With the blowing crosswind, if I didn’t concentrate on watching the deck compass, my boat would quickly get blown off course. There was no tree horizon to see- just pitch blackness. In the time it took to click on my headlamp and look at the McKenzie Map, my bearing would be completely messed up. And the wind was strong enough it kept blowing my map around so I couldn’t read it. I even resorted to turning on my GPS but it didn’t show any information on the Canadian side of the line and you need to be moving to get much useful info from it. Every time I attempted to check my map, our canoe would spin around and we’d be heading in who knows what direction. The other 2 boats following me must have thought I was drunk driving or something the way I kept changing course. And to make things worse, when I set my paddle down to hold the map and or GPS, the boat became unstable. Eventually I dropped to a kneeling position to get more stable. I don’t think the others knew I was struggling but I was very relieved when we made it to the right spot in the islands and a respite in the wind and waves came.

I will admit that later in the night near Friday Bay, I did miss one little opening between islands which caused us to go a little extra distance and wasted some time so I could figure out what happened. There is extra pressure when you are the one expected to know where you’re going and 5 others are counting on it. Twilight showed itself as we neared Wednesday Bay and I was relieved to see something other than the wall of blackness we had been paddling into for the last 4 hours. With daylight now we were feeling good and making better progress. Finishing Crooked Lake, passing through Basswood River, and paddling into big Basswood Lake, the wind direction changed from southwest to west or northwest.

The new wind direction was to our favor today as we were mostly heading east. I made another navigation error when I missed the English Channel shortcut. Oh well, I’m not a big fan of taking shortcuts anyhow. Shortly thereafter, with a nice tailwind pushing us, MAKK and I decided to have some fun and see how fast we could go- with GPS on to measure speed, we pulled hard and fast on our paddles getting up to 7 mph.

Shortly after 2:00 pm we made it to Prairie Portage and we lingered for 40 minutes here with some mid-day lack-of-energy-blues. MAKK shared some food with those who needed a boost before we headed through a series of small lakes and multiple easy portages on our way to Knife Lake. By the time we reached Knife, our portaging efficiency was perfected- this was great as the rest of the route to come has the bulk of the portages. Darkness fell (8:00 pm) while we were half way across Little Knife Lake. The whole team did real well today and with darkness coming it was time to consider how much further we would travel and get prepared for it by putting on extra clothes, food, and headlamps. We gathered together and decided we had had a good day and we would camp as soon as we entered Ottertrack Lake only a couple miles away.

With that incentive in our heads, we all raced down the remainder of Little Knife and crossed over a little used portage that I have used in the past. Most stay on the border and take a slightly longer route. This portage we would take allows only one canoe at a time to get back in the water since it has hardly enough room for even one boat. MAKK and I are the first back in the water and we head out on our own to locate a vacant campsite. The first 2 close ones are occupied and we paddle down the lake toward the next site. As we reach that site, we hear panic yelling coming out of the darkness…”me and MeatPuppet capsized! We’re all wet and cold, we need to get to a camp quick!” Oh no, I think to myself, all the sites are taken. Just then a lady from the 3rd campsite came down to the lake and told us that a little used site is open back the way we came, back by the portage that we didn’t take.

Back we went, everything is harder in the dark, including communication, travel, and finding a little used campsite that is so because it is accessed up exposed granite rock. None of us spoke of it but we all knew the urgency to find this site quick and get dry clothes on MeatPuppet and WhiteWolf. All went well and the site was found. I scrambled up the granite rock face toward the fire grate area and was greeted with a swarm of yellow-jacket wasps as I grabbed a tree root. The rest took an alternate route up to avoid getting stung. In no time JimmyJustice had a warm fire going, wet clothes were off, and I had a hot meal prepared. Over the warm fire, the story of how they capsized as they were shoving off from the portage was told. This little incident helped all of us to realize how well we were working together as a team and that we could trust each other to overcome problems. We were handling adversity together and with concern for each other- we were all becoming friends. Today’s progress was very satisfying for all- we had pushed ourselves even harder than that first day. We had traveled for almost 20 hours straight covering 58 miles! We were making up ground, now only 5 miles behind our schedule. For the first time, all were excited when I said we would get up earlier than planned so we will be back on schedule tomorrow.