We stayed in a bunkhouse in Ely the night before departure which I always like doing. In my experience, it allows the group to have some pre-trip bonding time before we embark on the journey. In this time, I learned that my least experienced BWCAer/outdoorsmen didn't pack any socks, long underwear, or long pants when we were looking at an average of 44 degrees over the next few days. He ended up getting a few things and doing fine but it did give me a little bit of a scare. After packing our GORP, playing some poker, and doing some planning on the maps we were ready to sleep.

The next day we packed up and had some breakfast at Britton's and set out. The day was rainy, windy, and cold but we were (fairly) prepared for it. We had a handful of portages ~25 rods along our route today and one 122 rod portage at the end. Otherwise, the challenge was surviving the rain and headwind off of Kawishiwi river. Throughout the day one of our canoe groups had a chant/song going to pass the time. "Ninety-nine baggies of GORP on the wall. ninety-nine baggies of GORP..." and "Heeeeee-Ho, Heeeeee-Ho" are a few of them. For wildlife, we saw about 6 swans, a beaver, a muskrat, and a bald eagle who swooped to grab a fish out of the water! We were really taking our sweet time on day 1 because we started paddling at 11:00 am and arrived at the southern part of Kawishiwi at 5:00 PM. We were hoping to stay on Gabbro so we had a decision to make about whether we were going to continue on and risk not finding an open site. After a vote, we unanimously chose to roll the dice and keep going. We completed the 122 rodder and went on to Little Gabbro and then to Gabbro. We were very lucky to find our #1 site (#1715) open! We arrived at around 7:00 PM and immediately divided into groups to get everything ready. We soon realized we were shorted a sleeping pad and that our day one steaks had barely defrosted but we kept on keeping on. After painstakingly getting the steaks ready and setting camp up, we were relieved to finally get some sleep. As the group leader, I decided to take the burden of sleeping with no sleeping pad and bundled up in all my warm sleeping gear and laid a puffy jacket below my sleeping bag which actually worked out pretty well as I slept very soundly.