LIS North, Upper and Lower Paunesses, Loon, Little Loon

Being all packed up from the night before, we got up early from my parents house in Aurora and headed to Ely for our permit and leeches. The day started out bad when I found out that one of my tackle boxes had fallen out of the canoe seat bag that I had filled with tackle the night before (forgot to zip it shut, doh!). Good thing I had over packed on tackle and still had another tackle box to use.

We stopped at The Great Outdoors and picked up some leeches and then picked up the permit. Up the Echo Trail we went to get to the put in at Little Indian Sioux River North. The weather report called for isolated thunderstorms today, with the rest of the week looking hot in the upper 80’s. We had decided to travel up towards Little Loon Lake, which is off limits to the motors (Loon lake is not). We were on the water by about 11:30 after all the miscellaneous odds and ends were taken care of.

Well, as soon as we got onto the water, it started to drizzle. The drizzle worked itself into a steady rain. It seemed ok other than the gear getting a little wet, as the weather was fairly warm. Saw a few people on the portages, some complaining about the boats on Loon Lake and how they were water skiing, lol. We knew this was to be expected on a lake that permits motors. We stopped by at Devils Cascade to take a look, nothing spectacular really. I was more excited to find a patch of blueberries there I could snack on.

We started fishing where the river opens into Loon Lake. There I caught a decent size northern, although, we put him back, not sure if we wanted to clean fish tonight, as we would be pulling in to camp later than we would have liked. We made our way up through Loon Lake and passed a camp with a couple motorboats docked at it. Probably, the kids the other campers were complaining about. Right as we came about on Little Loon Lake, a larger dose of rain came down on us.

We looked at the first site on Little Loon, and the tent spots weren’t all that promising, so we headed to the north site. It had a small beach, some decent tent pads, although slightly slanted. We decided to call it home. After scarfing down some spaghetti, we decided to try our luck at fishing. One of the guys pulled in a 19.5” smallie on the east shore. I managed to catch a 14” walleye. All were released, as we were tired and weren’t sure about fish for breakfast.

We got a fire going after fishing, which was a little difficult due to the rain, but there was sufficient dry stuff to burn. The night presented itself with a very nice sunset with a near full moon. We capped the night off with our traditional Karkov shots followed by Kool-Aid and called it a night.