After a slower start to the morning, we had some pancakes and bacon for breakfast. We talked over our plan to get to Wood today and do some fishing and knew that we would have to push and get a little lucky to find an open campsite on Wood as there are only 5 (and 2 entry permits on wood each day). After breakfast we packed up and set out for the day. Katie had begun to notice a shoulder pain the day previous that continued into today due to the repetitive motion of paddling. This meant that we were taking it a little easier today than we would normally on the paddling. Not quite the same case for the portaging as it turned out. We overpacked some for this trip and having just 2 of us meant that we had 4 packs and 1 canoe to portage. And because we are not weenies, we had one person double pack and the other double pack plus portage the canoe for nearly every portage we had. Katie started out tripled up but by the end of the day I had done most of the portaging with the canoe and 2 packs. Quite the workout! We portaged over to Back and started to make our way south towards Good Lake. On this trip, we were very focused on wildlife and stopped to ID and take in many birds and mammals that we saw. In our search for cool wildlife, we found some common mergansers! There were about 6 females on a rock under a tree. After taking a few pictures, we headed down to Hoist Bay. While on Hoist we realized we had been told about a cool hoist engine that was submerged in the lake somewhere. In retrospect, I wish we would have skipped over this because in looking for it we got lost on the lake and it took us a good while to figure out where it actually was. By the time we found it we were about done with Hoist and wanted to leave. We were originally planning on going down Good Creek to get to Good Lake but we found that we had to traverse a lot of reeds, lily pads, and submerged mud piles to get through it. Figuring that it might take us more time to get through the creek than to portage we opted to do the 130 rod portage instead. After our little goose chase for the submerged engine on Hoist we realized that it was getting late and started to worry about securing a spot on Wind. We knew that if we didn't find a spot that we were either going to have to backtrack 3 lakes or find a non-campsite to comp at. Right as this worry started to bubble up we came across a nice couple on the portage to Hula who told us that they had just entered on Wood at 1:30 (sheesh!) and site #1152 was still open. This gave us some hope and got us excited as this was my #1 spot on Wood! We hurried through the rest of the portage onto Hula. Before leaving for this trip, I wondered why there were no campsites on Hula and I figured that out when we got there. Our portage entrance and exit on Hula was very muddy with leeches and was not very fun to walk in with Chacos. The lake seemed like it was 2 feet in depth the whole time but when we tried to touch the ground with our paddles we realized that it was made up of at least 3 feet of soft muck (yuck!). We deemed that this was the worst lake possible to flip your canoe in. Other than that, our pathway to the Wood Lake portage was a scenic one through some tall reeds. Right before we got there we saw about 50 birds (some kind of waterfowl) fly out of the reeds. A very cool site! After the portage over to Wood we were hurrying out of anticipation to see if we could get a site. When we found #1152 open we were relieved to say the least. The last site open on Wood and, somehow, the nicest one? On a peninsula with room for about 6 tents and scenic walkway leading to a little personal fishing spot in the back? It beats me why this site was left open but whatever the case, we were happy to have it. We quickly set up the site and got right back in the canoe and paddled around while I fished. I had no luck with the fish but it was a nice pre-dinner paddle. There was a group of 5 fishing near our site and we were happy to see them erupt in joy as one of them pulled in a fish. We even celebrated with them! We then headed back to cook up some pasta with pesto and bacon with fried bread on the side. A very good meal! I got some more fishing in before the night was over in the bay on the back side of our site. Got a few bites on the frog but wasn't able to pull anything in. After that we both decided to hit the hay.