Thursday, July 12, 2007 Met with John from VNO at 6:30AM. He was packing the van for our drive to the Moose Lake entry point. Our tow to Birch Lake was set up for 7:30AM. It was a grey, dismal looking day. It was fairly cool and looked like rain. We reached Moose Lake in a short time and transferred our gear into the tow boat. In 15 minutes, we were at the short portage and in 20 minutes we were paddling Birch Lake, headed towards our first destination: Knife Lake. We had placed our raingear at the top of our packs, which was good because it looked like we were going to need it. Within a half hour it started drizzling. We were to spend the rest of that day’s journey alternating between overcast skies, light rain, sunshine (not a lot, though), and heavy rain. I had my raingear on and off at least three times, maybe more. The forty rod portage to Carp was muddy, but otherwise uneventful. I kept a special eye on Jamie, since this was her first trip and she had never carried a pack that large or heavy before. We double portaged and she did just fine. Three 15 rod “nuisance” portages were coming up. On the third of these, we were walking our canoe through some shallow water, just before the portage when I got the brilliant idea to remove my rain pants. The first pant leg got caught on my shoe as I was pulling it off and I fell full force onto my knee. Luckily, the bottom was small gravel rather than larger rocks. I spent a little time picking stones out of my knee, washed it out and we proceeded on our way. It was bleeding pretty good, so we broke out the first aid kit and bandaged it. We made the 75 rod portage into Knife Lake, where we intended to stay at least 2 days, unless the fishing was too good to leave. We wanted to make the South Arm that day. It was very windy and progress was slow. It began to rain and we put the raingear back on. After a couple hours of paddling it started to rain harder. We paddled the last 45 minutes or so in a downpour. None the less, it was enjoyable. I could tell that Jamie was getting tired, so we picked a campsite just short of Thunder Point. By the time we carried our packs up to the site, the rain was lessening. It was about 2PM. We set up camp and took an afternoon nap to get out of the rain for a while. After dinner (fresh steaks) we went out and fished for a bit. We stayed near camp due to the weather and fished a bay behind our site. Jamie caught one smallmouth trolling a leech on a spinner rig. We saw an enormous northern in shallow water, near some downed trees. Jamie asked me if it was a fish and I told her it was a log (which I believed). Then the log saw our canoe and turned and swam away. Must have been 40 inches at least. Later we were casting jigs with twister tails and Jamie’s got bitten off. I think it could have been that same pike, since we were in that area. We saw lots of squirrels, a couple of pine marten, two otters and a very large rabbit. We went to sleep about 9PM. It was pretty cold overnight and later I heard it got down to 38 degrees. I’m glad we brought the fleece jackets.