We awoke and felt rejuvenated after our relatively easy day before. My brother and I were actively hunting for a trip-wide BWCA Grand Slam of walleye, pike, smallmouth, and lake trout and I already had three of the four boxes ticked off. Lake trout aren’t common outside of a couple of places where we are from, so we decided that today’s trip was going to be to Sema Lake as we heard there are numerous trout in there, if not particularly big ones. The question we pondered for the morning was whether or not we wanted to day trip it or pack up camp a day earlier than we initially planned and then take a scenic route that started at Sema. After consulting the map and ruling out heading through the numerous portages to exit via Ensign, we opted to still go through Sema, the connected ponds, then through Spoon to Bonnie and out to Knife.

We packed up camp and headed out, with the idea of checking out the singular campsite on Sema and pushing on if we needed to. The portage was a pretty rocky 140 rods, and we feel like if it had rained that it would be a much more difficult portage. Luckily it was pretty dry and not a bad portage. Campsite 1420 isn’t a real campsite. Not a single real tent pad, no real place for a hammock, so we instantly ruled it out. The winds were creating some pretty solid waves, but James and Sean managed to troll for a couple of trout. Jon and I tried for a few passes, but as it neared 2pm and knowing we had several portages between us and the next campsites on Spoon we headed out.

The first short portage took us to a boggy area, with a pretty mucky landing. Not too bad, and the bog was an interesting change in scenery. The second little portage brought us below a quite long beaver dam that we had to bonus portage over into the pond. This little unnamed pond we ended up calling Beaver Metropolis. The beavers are certainly building their own little civilization here, and it’s quite the sight to see the work they are putting in. It took us a while to find the entrance to the portage - it is just to the south of the inflow from the creek on the west end. After heading through the slightly overgrown portage we landed in Spoon. It’s a beautiful lake! We checked out Campsite 1419 - a super cool looking site but no real hammock spots led us to Campsite 1418. The canoe landing situation is not great, but the site was very cool. Again, our two hammock two tent setup was in our favor here. Spoon is a beautiful lake, and the beaver ponds were fun. We didn’t see a soul after we left SAK and that was pretty neat, and this day was probably my favorite despite not doing a whole lot of fishing.