Mountain espresso is part of my gourmet wilderness portfolio. Crushed Folgers and boiling glacial water mixed with whipped butter topping. Wakes you up, makes you poop.

It was nice to sleep in and wake up to late morning wind and sun. After a couple mugs of mountain espresso we strung clotheslines around camp, completely cleaned the tent and hung our life up. We let the wind and sun do its magic and ate a big breakfast of poptarts, snickers and oatmeal. It was hard to be motivated to do anything with it being so nice out and the wind made any canoe trip too difficult so I flopped out on paradise rock and let my skin dry. Paradise rock faces west and on a nice day like today catches a gust of crisp early fall wind that is soon heated again by the late summer heat off of the rock. I bet the sunset off this point will be amazing tonight, and the stars…

Today was the first day we were able to pattern and track down the small mouth in any numbers. The first couple nights we fished our honey hole near camp, almost exactly 15 minutes before dark, the bass started coming to the surface to feast. They look like giant snakes breaking the top of the water, but never exposing more than their thick back. It didn’t take much skill to throw shad crank baits towards the water snakes appearing and they started hammering our lines. As quickly as we could throw the lures we were reeling them in. Within minutes, maybe seconds, we had 5 in the boat, three of them tournament winners 18.5-20”, 4+ pounders. Then, the 15 minutes were done, and so were the feeding fish. We kept two of the smaller ones to fry up tomorrow. For you fishermen that are laughing at us for eating two 14” smallmouth come over to camp Storm and I promise you I will change your mind.