Quetico Provincial Park: Days 3 & 4

Morning on Eyelet Lake

My third blog post about my trip to Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada.
Day 1
Day 2

Day 3

On our third day on Eyelet lake, we enjoyed instant oatmeal and set out to fish. We all had a really good morning fishing and saved a few couple pound ones for shore lunch. Bart filleted the fish, breaded them, and fried them in hot Crisco. I don't normally eat fish, but I did have a handful of pieces--they were very good!

We fished the rest of the afternoon and had our last few dry hours of the trip. It started to rain after dinner, so we retired to our tents.

Fishing from a rocky point. Dad and Jonathan on the island opposite.

Canoe with foam stabilizers.

You may be wondering what those foam tubes are on the sides of the canoes. They are stabilizers.They help prevent the canoe from tipping. Tipping in some of these lakes when it's cold and the weather is bad can be life-threatening--people have gotten hypothermia and drowned. The stabilizers help make tipping over and falling in less likely.

Day 4

Saturday morning, I woke up and Dad was in his rain gear making camp coffee. We prepared for it to be a wet day. The plan was to go fish in Wildgoose Lake, which involved going back through the stream we came in on.

Dad making coffee for breakfast.

Our damp tent and the canoes turned over from the night before.

Jonathan and Dad at a wide point in the stream.

Most of the whole day, it rained lightly or misted. The fishing was pretty good. Part of the time, Bart and I fished from shore and I almost caught a pike that I think was probably about 6 or 7 pounds, but it bit off my line!

Canoeing toward the island on Wildgoose.

We ate our usual peanut-based lunch on this island in Wildgoose. This is the location where we camped when I came as a kid, 16 years ago! It was fun to see it again. The water level is high and things have changed over the years, but I think it still seemed a little bit familiar to me. I am not sure it would still be considered an island because it's sort of grown in a bit.

Island campsite on Wildgoose Lake.

Shortly after lunch, we headed back to our campsite on Eyelet where they made a fire. Things were pretty damp but mostly not raining.

These shrubs grew everywhere:

Raindrops on flowering shrubs.

Burning material

They had to look for not-soaking-wet wood to start the fire.

Then, Bart and Dad left us there to go fishing for big northerns:

Bart and Dad going to fish for big pike.

They were in luck! Dad caught an over 20 pound pike! I was glad to have caught the first big one, but the whole time I had a feeling there would be more, and I was right.

While they were gone, we kept the fire going, washed up the dishes, and boiled some drinking water. Since we had been boiling our water, it was usually warm (we'd try to cool it down but setting our bottles in cold lake water) and smokey flavored with things like ash floating in it (and one time a dead spider). Sometimes it had a bacon grease flavor as well. It was pretty horrible. The thing I looked forward to the most when we got out was cold, clean, flavorless water.

We ate pancakes with our dinner. We cooked them over a broken campstove. I'm not sure what the problem was, but the only way it worked it shot out big orange flames. We had to hold the pan up to adjust the heat. The pancakes were delicious. They were thick (I think mine was an inch and a half) and fried and I thought it tasted like a donut. After the pancakes were done, we ran out of fuel.

Very fluffy fried pancake dinner.

And Bart and Dad ate the last of the bacon, which they had to cook on the fire.

Cooking bacon on the fire.

The next day, we would leave. It wasn't going to be getting any drier anytime soon. We'd had good fishing and we caught a few really nice ones. I looked forward to a day of portaging.

Meanwhile, our tent was soaked and dripping on my face.



More to come!