(Polly Lake, Koma Lake, Malberg Lake, Frond Lake, Boze Lake, Louse River, Trail Lake)

On day two we broke camp and headed north. We didn’t fish much at the start of the day but once we hit the portages and paddles to Koma we tried every hole in the river we could find. To Chad and Mike, these portages were optional and they opted to run the rapids or wade down them with their rental boat.  My canoe has been beaten enough so Greg and I took the portages. Fishing wasn’t very hot in the rivers pocket water so we didn’t spend much time there and instead kept moving to Koma.  Koma didn’t prove to be much better fishing for us. It wasn’t much of a surprise though, it was just about high noon and the sun was burning brightly over us. 

When we reached Malberg Lake our luck changed a little. The portage put us right at the base of the rapids from Koma Lake over a nice hole. We spent a good hour there hammering the smallmouth when we could find them. Jigs and leeches turned out to be the trick. When we got the canoe over a school of them it was just a matter of getting the leech down in the water. They were not very big but still fun to catch. After burning through a lot of leeches I decided to switch to a yellow mister-twister. I put a walleye in the boat shortly after that but that was the only walleye we could manage to hook there. After the fishing started to slow we made our way over to a campsite and had lunch. After lunch we headed east onto Frond Lake and then over to Boze. 

We realized on Boze Lake that we had the place to ourselves so we stopped again for a short fishing break. Chad and Mike were working the shore to the south west and Greg and I fished to the north. It was only a few minutes before a fish was hooked. We could sense from the commotion in the other canoe that the fish was a little more than average. As Mike worked the fish to the boat the first time we could tell it was a big fish by the loud thrashing it made in the water. After tiring the fish enough to land it Chad and Mike both speculated the walleye to be in the range of six pounds. I’m assuming that the fish was caught on a Shad-Rap as Mike swears by Shad-Raps. In fact, purchasing stock on Shad-Raps shortly before our annual trip would probably be a lucrative investment. A few more walleye and smallmouth were caught and released before we headed over to the Louse River.

We paddled the Louse River very slowly and quietly in the hopes to sneak up on a moose or any wildlife for that matter. It was a little hard to do this as many parts of the river were full of hidden boulders just under the waters surface, known as rock gardens or asteroid fields by some. It’s definitely not quiet when you collide into a rock with the bottom of a Kevlar canoe. The water was very slow moving if at all as the river twisted its way through the tamarack bog and cedar swamps. Despite being fairly uneventful as far as animal sighting was concerned it was still full of mystery around every bend. I was overwhelmed with an eerie feeling when we passed by where Barto Creek connected with the Louse River. It jutted off to the southwest straight down a hall of pines. It looked paddle-able and almost inviting, but was it really passable? I knew before long we would find out. Our planned bushwacking rout would have us traveling portions of Barto Creek in a couple of days.

We arrived on Trail Lake before too late and managed to get camp set up and fishing lines in the water before dusk. We had the lake to ourselves. As we sat there fishing from shore, turtles were constantly climbing on the rocks around us and meandering around until we’d move fast or look at them too much, which would send them scooting off into the water. It was too dark to see when we finally gave up on fishing and headed up to the fire ring to make dinner and settle down for the night. Shortly after that the turtles made their way further into camp. We’d occasionally here some rustling in the brush, at which we’d shine a light at, only to see a little turtle head starring back at us. That night, as I started to drift off I heard a sound, a sound that didn’t register with me until Greg said “Did you hear that” and I responded “A wolf!” A call we had all been longed to hear for the many years we’d been coming up to the Boundary Waters was almost too much to believe when we heard it.