Day 3 When we woke up we packed everything away in record time and hit the water. There was lots of fog on the water as we paddled. About 15 minutes later we arrived at Prairie Portage. We ate breakfast at the end of the portage and looked at the dam and some boats. I had cheese and crackers. This whole trip we lived off of cheese.

We paddled onto Birch Lake and into Carp lake. On Carp Lake we ran into two paddlers who were going pretty fast. We asked for their names and they replied Thomas and Jake. This just so happened to be the father and son duo we heard about after the trip. When our trip was over we learned that they paddled from Ely to Lake Superior in just a day and a half! I told my dad, “We need to break their record before I turn 15,” as a joke. After Carp Lake there were some other small lakes where not much happened except for throwing some rocks in the water. We got to Knife Lake and took a bathroom break at an interesting campsite, then continued paddling.

As we approached the end of Knife Lake we heard someone yelling something. We thought they might be saying bear. I suggested checking out the commotion so we paddled over to where the noise was coming from. We could see the guy in his canoe across the portage so I hopped out and asked him if he was okay while my dad kept our canoe from floating away. He told us that he was looking for his wife who went for a morning walk and hadn't come back for 4 hours. We told him we will go to his campsite and help look for her. So, after we did the portage onto Ottertrack Lake we set our wet stuff up on his clothes line to dry and gave him a whistle. He went by land and me and my dad searched by water. After whistling and yelling for 2 hours without any luck, we came back to camp to discuss the plan with him. On our way back to his campsite we saw another paddler passing us so we paddled to him and told him the scoop and he said he would keep an eye out. She had been lost for 6 hours at this point, so the husband decided to use his Garmin inreach to call for a search and rescue team. We decided to search in the direction we hadn't looked yet while he did that. He said, “Now that we’ve called for search and rescue she’ll probably show up in 5 minutes.” Spoiler, he was right. The guy asked us if we could move his canoe onto shore higher for him so we did. As we were doing that my dad shouted her name, and we heard a faint, “I’m here.” We both looked immediately and saw her and the dog she was with in the middle of 2 guys' canoe. They said they found her on the shore and figured that her campsite was the one across the lake and took her to it. Thank God they did! The first thing the husband said was, “That’s 2 days in a row!” After we thanked those people for bringing her back she told us she was trying to follow the shore back, but she was following it in the wrong direction. She said, at one point, she saw a yellow thing and thought to herself, “We don't have a yellow tent,” and kept walking. What she saw was the yellow tarp in their campsite, but she didn't recognize it! We got a picture with them, packed up our newly dry tent and tarp, said goodbye, and left to cross the rest of Ottertrack.

We got to Monument Portage and saw a group of 4 people who said it was going to storm. We then saw some eerie looking clouds and heard thunder. At the end of the portage we had a small snack and took some pictures.

Then we had to cross the big mud hole that my dad fell in the year before. Laughing Warrior fell in it the previous year, too. We crossed Swamp Lake and were met by Russ at the portage. We were both going to stick out the storm there. It started raining and then the thunder got louder. Not to make fun of him, but Russ was sitting under the tallest tree in the whole area for a while, which was worrying us. Despite just helping find a lost woman, me and my dad explored the woods for a short while. Russ and we found a pretty well covered area and talked with each other for a while until out of the bushes came a guy named Matt. Matt was also a person in the brigade, who started at Sha Sha and he hung out with us for the rest of the storm. We were there for roughly an hour.

Then we set out on Lake Saganaga. We paddled past a beach with a bright orange canoe and didn’t think too much of it. Later we learned that Beav and Kendra, 2 more members of the brigade, stayed the night at that campsite. We got to a large basin and started discussing options of where we should sleep. We also thought that it was weird we couldn’t see Matt ahead of us since he didn't have that big of a head start on us. Turns out he turned on another part of the lake we didn’t see. We got to a point named American Point and with darkness falling, had a risky decision to make. Do we cross the largest part of the lake, which is about 2 miles across, or do we sleep at American Point? With the nice weather and no waves we decided to do it, because who knew how the weather would have been when we woke up. We said some prayers while we crossed and made it with no problems. We camped at the first island campsite we found, even though it had a bad tent pad. I slept well but my dad, on the other hand, didn’t. Overall, I rated that campsite 3 stars. 35 miles.