August 22 - 28, 2007 - Canoe Trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Ely, Minnesotahttp://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=85878350757167

After nearly having to cancel our trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness near Ely Minnesota because of a kidney stone and my brother, Hank, having to cancel because of a hurricane threatening Corpus Christi, we finally were able to get underway as planned on Tuesday, August 21st. My flight went OK but Hank’s was delayed because of the weather and George Bush’s visit to Minneapolis. When he finally got to Duluth, his baggage didn’t arrive with him. We were told by Northwest Airline that his things would probably be on the first flight on Wednesday.

We spent the night in a motel in Ely and went back to the airport early to retrieve his baggage. To our frustration, the bags weren’t there on the first flight or the next one or the next one. We almost decided to cut our losses and just go home because we needed many of the things in Hank’s baggage for a successful fishing trip.

The airline finally agreed to give Hank $150.00 to buy some clothes and fishing tackle but we had already lost a whole day of our trip and our permit to enter the wilderness area had expired. The outfitter was able to get us another entry permit but it had to be a different entry point because the preserve limits the number of parties allowed to enter each day from each entry point. This necessitated that we take a different, less desirable, route into the preserve.

The outfitter drove us to the entry point and dropped us off about 1000 on Wednesday. Starting off we had two very long portages of more than ½ mile each, climbing over rough, rocky terrain. We were both pretty tired by the time we found an unoccupied camp site. The campers that had used the campsite the night before had scratched in the dirt, “ Bear August 21.” We really didn’t know if it was a joke or not but we didn’t have much choice but to stay because it was late and we were tired. In any event, we had a restful night. The next morning we tried fly fishing from shore and caught a few fish but released them. Later on we fished from the canoe and caught several smallmouth bass and Hank landed one small northern pike.

That evening after dinner we threw a line over a tree limb and raised our food pack as high as we could, about eight feet off the ground to keep any bears that might happen by from getting our food. About an hour before daylight I heard a scraping sound coming from outside the tent. I woke Hank and we listened for a while. Finally, I opened the tent and shined a flash light in the direction of the sound. We saw four eyes shinning brightly back at us from two rather large bear cubs. Their mother was clawing at our food pack. Since there were cubs we decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and waited to daylight to inspect the damage. She had clawed and chewed a hole in the bottom corner of the pack and had eaten about 1/3 of our provisions but we had enough left to continue the trip.

The next day, Thursday, we had several more long portages and were too tired to fish much by the time we got to our second camp site. We chose a beautiful camp site on the shore of Knife Lake, right on the Canadian border and spent our third and fourth nights there.

We had six short portages the on our fifth day to our last camp site. The camp site we chose was just past a portage around a short stretch of rapids. It was late by the time we had setup camp and had started to drizzle rain. We went out in the canoe fishing anyway and started caching fish right away. I caught two nice smallmouth bass and Hank caught a large northern pike on a tiny rig. It was amazing he landed it. By the time we got back to our camp it had started to rain harder. It was too late to clean and cook some fish so we released them and setup a lean-to so we could cook in the rain. It rained hard for about five hours. The tent leaked a little soaking Hank’s sleeping bag and neither of us got much sleep.

The sixth and last day we made it to the pickup site around 1400, about one hour early. The outfitter’s van arrived right on time to take us back to the lodge. We went out for a steak dinner and beer and spent the last night in a bunk room at the lodge.