Slept in til 8. Made coffee for the guys, I didn't really want it as I wanted to get moving. Made some undercooked oatmeal because we forgot the exact amount of water needed. Then one of E's Coleman fuel canisters started hissing/leaking after we took it off the stove. We decided, if this thing is gonna bleed empty, we might as well make more coffee. So here I am writing this while we delay our travel to one of the BWCA's busiest lakes more and more. It just hit 10am and we have minimum 45 min of takedown/packing left. We're not gonna get to a site until 5pm at this rate and it'll probably be a crappy one due to all of the others being taken. Also we have our longest portage of 111 rods today. I want to get moving but I am always overruled. Getting tired of it.

The area around Jordan Lake is really beautiful. I could spend a few days hanging around there, fishing and eating and napping in a hammock in the shade.

The portages of the day were not bad at all and we made it to Ensign in ~5 hours, from 11am to 4pm. Met some bros playing music, with way too much gear, at Cattyman Falls. I wasn't thrilled about the music, but at least they had "Summer of '69" playing. It was a little nice to hear a tune on the 7th day, I'll admit, despite my feeling that it kind of ruins the spirit of being in the wilderness. The falls were awesome though and we got some great photos and videos. We ate lunch at the portage as well, I think Texas mesquite chicken wraps.

There were SO MANY crayfish/crawfish at the Ashigan-Ensign landing. You could have scooped them up with a bucket. At that time we also noticed that Ensign was completely calm, which one camper told us about on the Ashigan portage. "Super weird" he said. After seeing Kek completely flat I have to agree, seeing big water so calm is weird, especially given the near-constant wind we've had.

Our site on Ensign is secluded, a bit back in a bay, and it's got a great view. It was quite busy, with every site being full on the paddle up here. I was very relieved to find this site open, because the lake so busy, and we would've had to paddle back quite a ways to look for other sites. It was a sunny, calm day. It was hot.

We had problems getting stakes into the ground due to so many rocks, but we made it work by tying paracord around very large boulders and putting boulders on stakes that didn't go in very far. It worked out alright.

We had an awesome fire courtesy of the huge downed birch we got on a canoe firewood expedition, about 400 feet across the bay. We stayed up til 1am stargazing again, taking photos of the Milky Way, and enjoying the fire. It was a good day, despite my irritation earlier. I just didn't want to get screwed like the folks I've read about and have to backtrack significantly, or worse, leave the BWCA early because of no available sites. Thankfully that wasn't the case.

Oh yeah, we had Mountain House Chicken Teriyaki for dinner and it was bomb. Thoroughly enjoyed it.