Day 19, Monday, June 6th.
It rained really hard last night. Hard enough that it woke me up several times. I tried to sleep in a little bit, but the rain just wouldn't let me, so I got up around 6:00 am. I hate cooking in the rain when I'm camping, but I decided to go ahead and get started on it, so I made breakfast while some of the Scouts were still asleep. We had boiled eggs, beef jerky, and a power bar for breakfast. Now that we're into our canoe trip pretty good, the food will get a lot simpler as the week goes on. One reason is because we have only stable items that don't require any refrigeration.
After breakfast we broke camp and loaded up all our gear. We got on the water around 8:45 am. I wanted to get an earlier start, but the rain really put a damper on everyone's spirits. We all hated taking down wet tents and packing all the wet gear up, but we really didn't have much choice if we wanted to get moving.
We had a total of 4 portages today. I've found that unloading and reloading the gear at each portage is probably the most time consuming and most difficult task associated with canoeing in the Boundary Waters.
We stopped for lunch at a nice campsite on Rib Lake, which is one of the lakes we paddled across. Our lunch today was peanut butter on a bagel, Cliff Bar, beef sticks, and flavored drink mix. Not a fancy lunch, but packed with plenty of protein, which is what we needed for all the paddling.
We made it to our destination campsite by around 3:00 pm. It was located on a small island on Long Island Lake. There are several different islands on this lake, but I believe that this is the only island with a campsite on it.
After setting up camp the boys wanted to do a little swimming. I thought the water was way too cold to swim in, but several of the boys swam. After they all got tired of swimming we all decided to do a little fishing. The fish weren't biting, so we finally gave up on that idea. We built a nice fire and decided to start dinner. Our dinner tonight was a freeze dried meal of Mountain House Chili Mac, E.L. Fudge cookies, pretzels, and some flavored drink mix in water.
Other than a small mishap, the day went really well. When I unrolled my tent I discovered that I had left my glasses in one of the pockets inside and they were now broken. I wear a semi-rimless style of glasses, and the wire under the lens had broken and the lens was now loose. No way to fix them, so I'll just do without them for the remainder of the trip.
We all turned in around 10:00 pm. Thankfully, the rain had stopped earlier in the day. It turned out to be a really nice day too.
This is my 100 Days Strong. What's yours?
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