Day 2: Day Trip
Saturday, June 7th, 2025
After another solid night’s sleep, we pack up camp and get ready to head to Voyageur Canoe Outfitters for a day trip today. Before leaving, we slowly drive around the campground to scout out future desirable sites for hammocks should we come here again. In order, the best sites for us that we saw are: 1) 18 2) 25 3) 30 4) 19 5) 27 6) 14.
I told Andrew at the very start of our drive that the hardest days of the trip are the first few days, because they are days of transition, adjustment, and non-stop work as we go from sleeping/driving overnight in the car, to a car camping site, to a bunkhouse, and finally, to the wilderness. In the past, this day specifically has left me feeling especially exhausted and frazzled, because so many tiny details still need to be worked out before tomorrow’s entry into the wilderness.
That said, it feels great to pull into the Voyageur Canoe Outfitters’ parking lot at 7:05 A.M. where the air is positively buzzing with the excitement of trips beginning and ending. We check in with Cassidy at the front desk where we sign our permit for tomorrow, watch the entry video, and find out that our bunkhouse for the night is already open. The bunkhouse is located a short 30-stroke paddle across the Sea Gull River, which provides a sense of adventure and privacy that we both appreciate. Andrew and I decide we will take all our gear over to the bunkhouse, then head out on our day trip. As I slide the canoe into the waters of the river, I say “At last, the canoe is in pure Minnesota water, where it belongs.” This moment has been a long time coming!
Even though it’s just a short day trip, we bring nearly all of our gear along with us to test the loaded trim of the canoe and to see how well we can portage our packs. I really don’t have any idea how much Andrew can portage comfortably, and each year I’ve done this, I’ve found a few chinks in the armor that need to be fixed. On the way back down to the water for our day trip, I discover something truly beautiful: A colony of pink lady slippers growing right by the walking path! Not once in my past three trips taken in the month of May have I ever spied a lady slipper, and with this fortunate sighting, our optimism for a great day in the park couldn’t be higher! At 9:15 A.M., we are headed out with the goal of fishing on Tenor Lake today. One of the workers at Voyageur told us he was just at Tenor the other day and caught walleye right from shore, so we are optimistic! While it’s been a busy morning, we have made great time to this point. Finally paddling out to do some fishing from our canoe feels like a great accomplishment after a year of preparation and all the travel to get up here. We stop at the northernmost campsite in the corridor briefly so Andrew can see what a Boundary Waters campsite looks like. While I fully expected this to be a rough and tumble site, I was pleasantly surprised by it and it would be a fine place to spend a final night in the park if the situation warranted stopping short of the exit point.
While it felt silly buying that extra map and compass for Andrew over the winter, it’s a very gratifying feeling to navigate our way up the corridor as a team, discussing various waypoints and bays along the way as we search for the Tenor Lake portage. The portage is a bit overgrown and difficult to see, but we got it figured out easily enough. The portage itself features a shallow landing full of hull-gouging rocks and some rough footing through the brush, but thankfully it’s extremely short. Before I even have time to get the canoe fully ready to go, Andrew catches a small northern from the northern shore of Tenor with a Mepps “Comet” spinner with a chartreuse twister tail. Then another! I toss out a medium sized perch Rapala X-Rap and also catch a small northern. We found them!
After this much early success, it’s hard to make the effort to even get into the canoe to fish, especially since it’s getting windy from the south. But there are other areas of this lake we want to explore and fish, so we stop casting for a minute so we can load up and try trolling the shore. With limited time before we need to paddle back and head to town for Saturday night Mass, I decide we don’t need to spend time setting up the fish finder today, though I’d love to see more data on this little-known lake.
The action along the north side of the lake can only be described as fast and furious, both of us having equal success. At one point, I hook into what feels to be a very nice sized smallmouth, but he finds a way to worm his way under a log and shake the lure. Another time, Andrew hooks into a fish with about 12” of line out that makes us both laugh, then what we both swear was a walleye, but it gets off right at the boat. We paddle further south to explore a couple more promising wind blown shorelines, but don’t have much luck, so we head back to fish the north side again. While trolling, I readjust my rod holder, forget to lock it back in to the mount, then hook into a fish and the rod holder goes over the side and into the lake. That hurts a bit but I know I can make do without as I’ve done on past trips. And when you’re catching fish, nothing else really matters, right?!
Andrew is very excited at how well our fishing has gone so far. While we don’t find nearly the quality of fish in Tenor as we caught in Sag yesterday, we catch almost as many fish in just a couple hours as we did over the course of the whole day yesterday! My number one worry about this trip was coming all the way up here to get completely skunked, and after today, those stresses are gone. Everything else from this point onward is a bonus, and we still have the entire week in the wilderness ahead of us!
We paddle out from Tenor at noon, allowing extra time to paddle into the breeze back to the bunkhouse. On the paddle back, another canoeist gives us a thumbs up and says “That’s a beautiful boat!” I respond the only way I can think of, by saying “Thank you! It’s a dream.” We spend a few minutes with our gear making the final decisions as to what gear will make the cut and what will be left behind. After today’s success fishing and challenge on the little Tenor portage, we decide that it’s best to leave the fish finder with its bulk, awkward mounting system, and heavy battery behind. We also choose to add a third pack to spread out the gear load a bit more so the load is more manageable for Andrew. Making these final decisions about the gear is a great feeling, lending at last a sense of finality to the year-long process of packing! On our way down to the canoe landing, we spook some unseen small animal into a pile of building supplies along the trail, that we never see again. We leave for town at 2:30 P.M. On the way down the Gunflint Trail, both of us completely famished, we eat our dehydrated lunches from the thermoses. Andrew naps a bit before we arrive in town.
Once back in town, we stop at Buck’s Hardware for gas and the all-important leeches. Of course, we both get sidetracked by the fishing lure section, and purchase 4 more X-Raps and a Husky Jerk. This feels completely silly, but last year I lost my best lure during the trip and I am going to have more than enough on hand for all the fishing we will be doing this time around!
Still clad in our soggy canoe clothes, we go to Mass at St. John’s and are surprisingly asked to assist in bringing up the gifts during the Mass. Had I known this would happen, maybe I would have found a way to be a bit more cleaned up! Oh well. In the parking lot after church, I check the weather on my phone one last time, because my weather radio for some reason hasn’t picked up any reception at the end of the trail. The best weather days appear to be Tuesday-Thursday, with light rain expected Monday and steady rain expected Friday.
There’s no rhyme or reason
Ain’t a damn thing you can do
Some days you write the song
Some days the song writes you.
~Guy Clark, “Some Days You Write the Song”
On the way back up the trail, we make our customary final calls back home. When outside of cell reception and nothing left to focus on but our trip, I lay out the specifics of our route plan for the week, with the weather forecast impact included. It doesn’t take us long to decide that we want to spend as much time as possible on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday fishing. Our original plan had us traveling from Red Rock Lake to Grandpa Lake on Wednesday, effectively nixing one of those fishing days. Both of us are uncomfortable with this, and catching northern on Grandpa Lake has always been the main focus of this route for us. And so it is decided that this week’s trip will be based solely from a camp on Grandpa, allowing us plenty of time to fish Grandpa, Roy, and perhaps even the southern end of Sag when the weather allows it. Both of us are excited about this plan!
We make it back to the bunkhouse at 7:30 P.M., feeling hungry, frazzled, and way behind on final packing for tomorrow’s paddle out on Sag. We ready the fishing poles with X-Raps for trolling while we travel, distribute the gear appropriately to the packs, get the beds ready for our sleep, cook supper, and eat. In order to make all of this happen, we are in and out of the door about 1000 times. There isn’t much air moving tonight so the bunkhouse is stuffy, and opening the windows only seems to let more swarms of mosquitoes in through the window screens. The bugs are definitely getting worse as the evening wears on, and we are getting more exasperated! Both of us are pretty tired of dehydrated food already, and barely touch tonight’s meal. Instead we spend most of suppertime killing as many mosquitoes as possible! We are so tired!
We make one final paddle across the river at sunset with a few more small items we don’t need to bring along, then back across the river to do dishes and get ready for bed. At long last, we hit the bunks at 10:45 P.M. We had planned to paddle out at sunrise for the most favorable winds possible on mighty Sag, but as tired as we are, I choose to set the alarm for the lazy late hour of 5:30. That time turns out to be more than early enough, because neither of us could sleep much for the first 2-3 hours of the night. The bunkhouse is still stuffy and the mosquitoes are positively voracious. We both can’t help but laugh quite a bit at our pathetic state of affairs while simultaneously going crazy with exhaustion and the bugs that keep attacking. Andrew tries a couple of times to sleep in his head net, but has no luck with that. My bottom bunk has about 3” of clearance, so I can’t do much to move around to escape the bugs, which also makes us laugh pretty hard. Sleep somehow settles on both of us well past midnight. I awaken with a jolt in the middle of the night with hamstring cramps that send shocking ribbons of pain all the way down the back of both of my legs and can’t help but scream! What a day and night this has been!

Stats—> Portages: 2 | Portage rods: 10 | Paddle distance: 7 miles | Fish caught: 7 pike | Lakes: Saganaga, Tenor