Saturday actually begins shortly after midnight. After more than 35 BWCA trips I prided myself on safety...but the wilderness has a way of humbling even the most experienced paddler. At about midnight, I was sleeping when al of a sudden one of the trees I had hung my hammock in broke and my hammock, with me in it, came crashing to the ground. Scared the blueberries right out of me! So in the dark I basically had to find a new place to hang. Fortunately the only thing that got hurt was my pride! When I woke up in the morning, I went back to the scene of the crime and found the source of my near death experience (to quote a Jerry Vandiver song). The tree that broke was actually a dead tree. When I had hung my hammock in the day before, I looked up and saw a live green cedar tree, but what I really was looking at was not cedar leaves, but rather green moss growing in a dead tree. In the end it was a great reminder of how the smallest mistakes have the potential to have severe consequences! You can see the tree in the photo below.

We had planned on packing up camp and trying to find a spot on Saganaga for our last night. That big lake spooks me, but I had never camped there and there are a bunch of island sites right near Sag Falls where we were going to be catching our tow on Sunday. But one of the cool things about wilderness camping is that your plans are beholden to no one. Andrew decided that because this was such a beautiful campsite AND we still were the only people on a the 1000 acre Maraboeuf lake, that we should instead spend the day exploring the lake and doing some fishing. That turned out to be a great decision!

We woke up and first things first picked a couple cups of blueberries from around the camp. Then in a breakfast only found in the BWCA made fresh blueberry pancakes with Ghee, real Wisconsin maple syrup and an order of precooked Hormel Bacon! It was a meal fit for a king especially after being rounded off with some piping hot coffee! After chores we grabbed our poles, some snacks and headed off for a day on our own personal lake!

What a great day, we started out right away catching smallies. We paddled the western shore, then headed to the east along the south shore and checked out every single campsite on Maraboeuf. All were empty and not another soul was on the lake. Meanwhile, we continued to catch small mouth everyplace we put in a line. We explored the bays, the swamps and the entire shoreline, eventually making it back to the Devil's Elbow where we were sure from reading the fishing forum on this board that we were about to slay some Walleye. Well in the spirit of not looking a gift horse in the mouth, the walleyes never materialized but the smallmouth continued to almost jump in the boat all the way through the elbow. (you can see me with one of them as we stopped to shore fish at one of the more "currenty areas" in the photo below.

Finally, the wind had started to blow pretty good so we decided to head back to camp. It was later in the afternoon so we decided to cut off some paddling time and take the 35 rod portage across the Canadian portion of Maraboeuf to near our campsite. That may have been a bad choice because that portage contains some of the biggest boulders to climb across as any portage I've seen before! But we made it and had a nice paddle back to camp. We also were able to see (from the canoe) a couple of campsites on islands on the Canadian side. Wish we would have had an RABC to check them out as they were empty too. We fished on the way back to camp. By the end of the day we had quit counting at 100 small mouth bass! No walleye and only a single slimey pike. Along the way we stopped around lunchtime and had a snack and while on the shore proceeded to pick a liter bottle full of blueberries for a snack later that night!

After we made it back to camp, it was time to spool up the radio to catch the Brewers-Twins game and have some supper. For dinner I had Camp Chow Turkey/Cranberries and Dressing and Andrew had Camp Chow Beef Stroghanoff. Camp Chow really is my meal of choice in the wilderness. It is so much better tasting than the mass produced brands like Mountain House and the variety is spectacular. It was almost like a Thanksgiving dinner.

After dinner, while listening to the game, it was time for Andrew to show his skills at dessert. We had a package of Camp Chow Berry Cheesecake (just add water), but Andrew wanted to spice it up. So, he took a bunch of the blueberries we had picked earlier, mashed them up, then added some of our remaining maple syrup and a 50ml single of fine bourbon. He then heated the mixture in a pan and added the sauce to our awaiting cheesecake. Oh My Goodness!!! The best dessert I have ever had in the wild! That along with a cup of coffee with a shot of bourbon and another Brewers win was the icing on a perfect day! We spent the evening playing cribbage and listening to a loon before heading to sleep (this time I was hung between 2 live trees).