Most mornings, we are up by 6:00 AM as neither of us like to sleep in, and Monday was no different. The sun had already been up for a couple hours anyway, so out into the chilly morning air we ventured. Every day of this trip other than the first and the last, the nights dropped to the mid to upper 30's, which took a day or two to adjust to, but didn't really bother us as we had the proper gear to handle it with no issue. We ate a quick breakfast and started fishing our way back down the Boulder River the way we had come the day before. We didn't have much luck, but fishing was not the first focus for this morning- exploration was. We turned off into the Dahlgren River and fished our way up to the the first rapids, catching a small pike and a decent smallmouth bass, along with a nice 20" walleye right below the faster moving water. We checked out the pools above the rapids (no luck) and got some close up pictures of a pair of loons that were very interested in a nearby beaver lodge. I looked for a nest, but didn't see one there, and was glad I hadn't disturbed them in that process.

After taking a short break, we pulled our canoe up to the Dahlgren portage and walked to the other end, where our "big adventure" for the week would begin. I had planned on us getting to Batista Lake for months, and hoped to get a canoe there. That didn't happen, but we did make it overland through the woods by compass and GPS, and visited a lake few people see these days. You can read more about it at the following link or search for "Visit to Batista" in the trip planning forum.

https://bwca.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=forum.thread&threadId=1161470&forumID=16&confID=1

After our visit to Batista Lake, the winds had really picked up and we decided to try and fish the current areas of the Boulder River to the NW of that portage. A stray storm cloud came up and dumped heavy rain and wind on us for about 30 minutes, so we tucked into quiet bay area full of grass and weeds and caught a few fish while the weather cleared up. After that, we paddled up the other part of the Boulder River past the "rapids" marked on the map (they were underwater and not even noticeable). In a narrow section of river past that, we found a couple holes and Curt's jigging found several nice walleyes. I switched to a jig and managed to catch one as well (I'm not a jig fisherman, but when in Rome...). We fished all the way back to the falls coming out of Agnes, but by then even the Boulder River was whipped up to whitecaps and we couldn't stay where we wanted to be at all. We called it a day for fishing and headed back to camp to make dinner.

After a well deserved walleye dinner we explored the bluffs next to camp. They gave some great views of that area of Boulder Bay and are definitely worth the few minutes it takes to head up there. We packed up the extras around camp and prepared for an early morning push the next day. The breeze off the bay and the lack of mosquitoes led to one of our best campfire nights of the trip, and somehow about 1/3 of the bottle of Captain Morgan and one of the bottles of Coke disappeared that night. Funny how that happens after a long day on the water.