As I mentioned in my previous post – We woke up on our 4th morning in the BWCA to light rain on South Arm of Knife lake. It started to clear up for us as we headed into the far north portion of our trip, and into Canadian territory. Please enjoy this “vlog” (that I make to send to our families when we don’t have any phone service for days and days!) as we were packing up to leave for the day.

The night before, Shannon had been looking closely at maps and found a short portage, that was a short paddle from our campsite – and we opted to try it, saving us about an extra 4 mile paddle around “Thunder Point”. It turned out to be one of the most beautiful paddles of the trip, and the best weather as well. It was SO exciting when Shannon pointed ahead of us and said “there’s Canada!”

From my trip notes: ” Wednesday Day 4 – Wake up to rain that cleared by 9am. Peach Oatmeal and hot chocolate. Paddle out of South Arm Knife, quick portage at 1443 to Knife Lake and up into Canada. Beautiful sunny day. Paddled past Gijikiki and headed into Ottertrack lake. Landed at Campsite #2002 just in time for a huge rainstorm. M caught a Northern Pike and a Smallie and S cooked them for dinner. Rain all afternoon. Paddle was 7.37 miles. Too wet for Campfire. Bed early.”

Shannon had just enough time to filet and fry fish for us for dinner before it started raining. It rained all night long. We ended up heading into the tent at around 7pm and didn’t re-emerge until the next morning. This is what greeted us after all that rain:

• Side note – Shannon did a LOT of research about the best bug repellant for this trip. By far the most effective item he got for us was the Thermacell Mosquito Portable Repeller (linked). It says that it includes a 15 foot zone of protection and that is absolutely true. It’s almost like you have a dome around you when this thing is around. We kept it close to us when we were camping, and kept it going 24/7, leaving it right outside the tent door each night before bed. It requires a “repellant mat” to be inserted in front, which we replaced about every 4 hours, and you must have small fuel cartridges to keep it running. You cannot fly with the fuel cartridges – and we got ours on our Wal-Mart stop on the way to the outfitter from the airport
• In addition to the Thermacell, we brought 4 different types of spray/lotion repellants and I’ll link them all: The Repel Lemon Eucalyptus Deet-Free repellant we’ve used before in other locations. Mosquitos really seem to hate it. Ben’s Tick and insect repellant – Wilderness formula with 30% DEET. Picaridin Lotion which is made from chrysanthemum flowers and works great but is toxic to pets. We liked this stuff a lot, as it is a light weight lotion that you can put on and it doesn’t have a strong smell. It does burn your eyes though and Shannon said it made his lips tingle – it has warnings on the label not to get it in your eyes or in your mouth. And finally is the Sawyer SP657 Premium Permethrin for clothing, gear and tents, which bonds to fabric fibers for up to 6 weeks or through 6 washings, and which he soaked our tent and some of our clothes in and it seemed to work pretty well.
• We brought mosquito/black fly head nets that would fit over our hats, and didn’t use them in the first week of June. The black flies were just starting to appear at the end of the first week, but we didn’t see any in the section we were in.

From Trip notes: “Day 5. Wake to rain and mosquitos taken over. Breakfast skillet and raspberry hot chocolate under tarp in the rain. Pack up as rain let up. Paddle 7 miles through Ottertrack mostly in the rain to Monument Portage, to Swamp Lake (M face planted). Then, teeny portage about 25 feet into Saganaga and campsite #336. Last site before take out and 2 miles from American Point pick up location. Arrive mid-day and set up camp in the rain and cold. M made hot lunch of chicken noodle and S made hot chocolate coffee. Lovely campsite – settling in for a few days. Cold rain all day. Listened to one radio station under tarp. Took a nap and got warm. Woke up and rain stopped. Ate lasagna and berry crisp. Ended day with roaring fire and beautiful sunset.”

From the article linked below; “Benny Ambrose was the last man allowed to live in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. He established a homestead on Ottertrack Lake in the late 1920’s and lived there until his death in 1982″. If you’re interested in reading more about his interesting life, here’s a link to a blog article all about it. There’s a great old picture of him standing in his kitchen in this article that makes me wish I’d have gotten to meet him. The rain and cold weather we paddled in past the spot where his homestead once stood prevented us from wanting to get out and explore, so here’s hoping for better weather next time we pass by it. We were ready to get to our next campsite, which would be our final one of the trip, and get warmed up!

Campsite #336 on Saganaga, was by far our favorite of the trip, and thank goodness because it’s where we landed for the next 3 glorious days. Once the rain let up after we first got there, it moved out and we didn’t see it again.

Day 6 of our trip, in our favorite campsite, is where we both finally caught Walleye! This is a fun story; Shannon had been fishing for hours. Lets say about 5 hours from around 8am until around 1pm and he had moved all around to different spots along the shore and hadn’t caught anything all day. I’d been sitting by the fire all morning, alternating with laying in the hammock and staring out into the water. At some point after lunch in the early afternoon, I got up and decided to throw a fishing pole into the water for a little while. I had been there maybe 10 minutes when I caught a Walleye!!! I was SO excited – but immediately felt kind of bad because of how long Shannon had been at it, unsuccessfully. The Irony!!! He ended up catching a bigger one than mine a few hours later so it all came out ok. We had about 5 Lbs of fish for dinner that night!

On the one and only station we could get on our small radio, we’d been listening to NPR news and jazz most of the day. After dinner, we were sitting by the fire listening when we heard the announcer say that a local trivia show was “coming up next”. We thought this sounded like a lot of fun, so we tuned in. The show is called Small Change (website linked) . From the site: Small Change is WTIP’s weekly one-hour call-in trivia show. Each week WTIP hosts throw out trivia questions in a variety of genres and teams and individuals in radio land gear up with their speed dials and answers ready in this action-packed program. That’s 387-1070 or 1-800-473-9847! Small Change is made possible, in part, by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, which supports arts and cultural programming on WTIP.” We absolutely loved this show! Not only was it engaging and fun trivia that we sometimes knew the answers to, but it seemed like the entire community of Grand Marais was listening! The call -ins to answer the trivia came one after the other, and the only “prize” for answering is that the host rings a bell and says “that’s right!” and everyone cheers! It sounded like the people calling in were sitting around their kitchen tables with their friends and families cheering them on in the background. It’s all very wholesome, with rules that exclude using profanity, and insist that callers act nice. We loved it so much that the following Friday, we invited the family over and had a pizza party and listened from our living room back home in Alabama!

We ended our 6th day with a beautiful sunset, and the call of loons echoing all around the lake. This video was taken at 10:35pm!

As this was our first evening following a day of relaxing, instead of paddling and portaging, we had enough energy to stay awake and see the sky turn dark, which doesn’t happen this far north until after 10pm. We stayed up and watched the stars come out, and tried to make out the constellations using a “Night Sky ‘ little star chart Shannon bought just for this purpose. We watched the stars and the satellites for awhile, and then settled into peaceful sleep for the 6th night in a row. One thing we both agreed on was how well we slept the entire time. I’ll explain more about why this was true and tell you more about the rest of our trip- up next!