Day 6: At Last
Thursday, May 23rd, 2024
After my late night moon dance, I fall asleep for maybe an hour before morning light and the need to get moving stirs me from my hammock. Today’s forecast is for winds from the west at 5-10 mph with gusts to 30 mph. The presence of gusts so high above the steady state winds is very weird to me, but after yesterday’s misadventures in the weather, I’m in no position to question anything that comes out of my magical red weather box. Given my light sleep and the strain of yesterday, it’s hard to get moving, but every light puff of wind through this campsite reinforces a mantra ringing in my head: “Get off this rock!”

Fortunately it doesn’t take long to pack up my minimalist camp, and I’m on the water at 7 AM. Remembering yesterday’s navigational challenges, I take the time to shoot a quick bearing to the Seagull portage from the campsite, and am comforted to find that I’m so close I can actually see the wide, well-traveled portage landing. In less than five minutes of paddling, I reach the landing. As expected, this is a very straightforward, wide portage. There is some water flowing on it, but nothing too flooded, especially in comparison to yesterday.

I'm so lonely
But I know what I'm going to do
I'm gonna ride on
Ride on…
I ain't too young to realize
That I ain't too old to try
Try to get back to the start…
And I ain't too old to hurry
'Cause I ain't too old to die
But I sure am hard to beat
AC/DC “Ride On”
I’m feeling great, having reached Seagull early in the morning to set myself up for success. However, I contemplate multiple times the possibility of just paddling straight to the public landing and ending this trip, because I am so weary of constantly cold, wet, and windy conditions. The old feelings of guilt about being away from my family, especially, my kids, begin to well up again, and I think getting back to see them a couple days early will make it all better. But I know in my heart that would be a regretful decision. Grandpa simply isn’t a lake that fits into a lot of route plans. With plans for two nights there and a healthy pike population, it offers my best chance to finally catch some fish, an accomplishment that keeps eluding me. Before I bring my kids with me on future trips, I feel strongly that I owe it to them to do all I can to figure out how to catch a fish or two up here. In short, I’ve come all this way, and in spite of my continued fishing failures, the only way to succeed to is to keep betting on myself to figure it out. To Grandpa it is.

But before Grandpa, I have a serious task in front of me, and the clock is ticking. While paddling conditions are good with a modest quartering tailwind helping me down the length of Seagull, I know that the conditions could worsen at any moment. Once reaching the first open stretch of lake, I feel confident enough to shoot a 050 degree heading toward a massive barren rock that takes me straight across the main body of water. After 45 minutes of paddling, I begin looking for the campsites on Miles Island and find I was one island too far to the north. The waves are building as I paddle south to loop back around Miles Island to get to the northeast corner of the lake where the portage is. As I round the western tip of Miles, the waves are at their worst, having built along the full fetch of the lake to this point. Paddling into them is easy enough, but making the turn around the island is a scary experience since I am briefly exposed broadside to the waves. That said, I never feel I’m out of control, and I am right next to shore with well-established campsites if I dump the canoe.

After making the turn, I’m sheltered from the building wind and waves as I paddle to Seagull’s northeast bay. For the first time since paddling on Little Sag, I allow myself to relax a little. The worst of the wind and waves should be behind me for this trip. I’m looking forward to the simpler, more carefree existence that staying two nights on a smaller lake offers. The weather forecast is much improved for the coming days, and there will be no more major travel days. In spite of my horrible track record, I allow myself to feel optimistic about catching (and eating) just one medium-sized fish. All of these feelings are further enhanced when I see the picturesque cedar archway above the portage landing to Grandpa come into view. This is really going to happen!

The full crossing of Seagull takes me 90 minutes.

My research indicated that this would be a very difficult portage, and that research was validated. From Seagull, the initial climb is interminably long and steep, with a small rock face to navigate. There are two mucky boardwalk areas, and the first one is in poorer condition than the second. After this, there are two more smaller climbs. It takes me 25 minutes to make it across with the pack, leading me to believe this one is well over 200 rods long. While the trail is easy enough to follow, it’s clearly not traveled much and therefore features plenty of interesting plant life along the way.

At 10:30, I am on Grandpa, and I can see the campsite on the point from the portage landing. After five minutes of paddling, I am at the landing which isn’t great with plenty of large, loose rocks below the water to deal with. This is a nice spot, an airy pine-duffed forest of jack pines that are uniformly sized and openly spaced. The view to the west from the fire grate on the point is perfect, the only weakness being that it is exposed to those strong west winds. Tomorrow afternoon’s forecast is for more wet and windy weather moving in, so I decide to string up the tarp again, figuring I’m a pro by now. I soon find out that I’m not a pro at all and spend over two hours dealing with tarp lines that somehow tangle themselves around half of the pile of brushy firewood left at the grate, and the howling west wind blowing the tarp about like a sail. But it is done!

After filtering water, setting my hammock in the jack pines, and tidying up camp, the winds calm a bit and the weather is gorgeous. “If I were a pike, I’d be biting right now,” I think to myself. Usuallly, I avoid relaxing until I have procured an ample supply of firewood, but I’ve been dragging my pole around for a week, and now is absolutely the time to do the fishing I’ve been longing for!

There are perch in here, so I troll the north shore of the lake with a jointed perch shad rap and have zero bites. I switch to a perch X-Rap and try the weedy bays, but they appear a bit mucky and shallow, and I get zero action. I keep trolling the X-Rap toward some more bouldery areas with a few fallen logs in the water, and lo and behold, I catch a fish! At first I don’t think he’s anything too special, but he measures 23” and has a deep gash in his back from an apparent fight with a larger pike, so I decide he will be eaten and put him on my stringer, rusty from years of disuse. That just happened! I keep joyfully saying to myself “I caught a fish! I caught a fish!”

I continue to troll up and down the sunny shorelines in the western bay and keep having good luck, boating three more fish, a couple smaller ones at 16-18 inches and a 20 inch. When unhooking one of these smaller fish, one of the treble hooks gets driven deeply, all the way to the shank, into the fleshy tip of my thumb. Somehow I’m able to quickly get the fish off, and then do all I can to breathe slowly and remain calm as a work to get my pliers out to deal with my thumb. Every single hook I use up here is barbless, and this very situation is a primary reason why. Thankfully, just one or two solid pulls removes the hook cleanly and I’m back to fishing right away. While it hurts, my only option was to approach it with a very cold hearted simplicity: The hook is in my thumb, I am alone, and the hook must come out.

I almost keep the 20 inch fish too, but don’t want to keep more than I can eat or desire to clean. Eventually I get into a big tangle of some sort with my stringer, fishing line, and the fish. Two hours have flown by, and I decide it’s a good time to clean up the snarl and go scavenge some firewood before heading back to camp to clean the fish and prepare for a feast. Finding firewood is easy enough, though it’s basically all jack pine here, with very little cedar to be found.

Back at camp, I take my time cleaning the fish. I’ve read a few times about how to clean a pike but considering I’ve never cleaned a pike before, it goes well enough. Supper is chili with some sauerkraut and banana nut bread pudding for dessert. Before the trip, I decided to use the same homemade fish breading mix I’ve had in a bag for a couple of years rather than make new, and it turns out to work just fine for frying the fish in some oil. When done cooking, I have two full bowls of fish nuggets. The first taste of this fish is nothing short of magical. So much dreaming, discomfort, work, and failure is distilled into this first bite, and I take the time to fully enjoy each bite of this meal, and every single piece of this fish. Sure, I could have hurried though supper, ate a little less, or spent less time enjoying the view. Had I done so, I could have gone out and fished so more in the perfect weather. But this meal was one that was tailor-made to be lingered over, and I took in every single joyful moment, turning it over, ruminating, and savoring it.

Catching the fish, cooking the fish, and eating the fish all feels like some sort of ancient ceremony, a way that man has deeply connected with the nature that surrounds him since the beginning of time. As I gaze into the burning embers of my campfire, I feel a deep connection to my primitive soul. I think about the “ancient ones” in my life that have shepherded me along to this very moment. My grandma Boots, who passed away over ten years ago, taught me how to fish, and also how to simply enjoy the act of fishing itself when the fish weren’t biting. My uncle Darris brought his Brittany Spaniel dogs out to the farm on fall weekends and always set me up in the best place to have a chance at shooting a Ring-necked Pheasant or a Northern Bobwhite Quail. My father had occasionally set bank lines in the Smoky Hill River for flathead catfish, and often brought my sister and I along in the family’s Grumman canoe to check the lines and try our hand at paddling. While I didn’t shoot many birds or catch many fish, those that I was fortunate enough to bring home were cooked by my mother. Most of these experiences in the outdoors were shared with my best friends in high school, Jared and Brandon. Two years ago, I miraculously caught and ate my first (and only) lake trout in Rabbit Lake with my friend Shawn. I wish I could share this very moment with each one of them, right now. That said, through all I have learned and shared with each of these people, in a way, all of them are here. A small part of each of them lives inside of me.

With this ritual meal complete, I can think of only one way to perfectly cap off this magical day in the Boundary Waters. I quickly strip down and run as far as I can into the water from the landing and fully immerse myself in the clear, icy waters of Grandpa Lake with a high-pitched “Ya-hoooo!” of shock and pure joy. After a quick stroke or two underwater, I head back to dry by the fire before re-dressing.

This is what a perfect day in the Boundary Waters feels like. I sleep deeply, inundated with the satisfied peace and contentment that only comes after the successful completion of a long, arduous journey.

Stats—>Lakes: 3|Paddle distance: 4.3 miles|Portages: 2|Rods: 306 (0.9 miles)|Travel time: 4 hours

~Alpine Lake, Sea Gull Lake, Grandpa Lake