Big Lake Trout in the BWCA

September 24, 2012

Big Lake Trout in the BWCA

Time for the annual fall trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area in NE Minnesota. This year it was just 4 of us, as Mark White found out at the last minute that he has a mandantory training the week we were going to be in the BWCA. Rick Len graciously offered to go with Mark on a two man trip, the week after we (George Zimmerman, Brad Dobski, Jeff Norby and me) went so we all got into the BWCA, just not on the same trip.

A ten day, nine night trip. We did the tow across Moose Lake, which saved us at least 3 hours of paddling and allowed us to get into Lake Kekekabic (Kek) in one day (10 portages). Kek is a beautiful big deep lake that has only lake trout. We grabbed a really nice campsite inthe western part of the lake, and only saw a few groups passing through over the course of the three nights we were in Kek. We caught a number of nice but not huge Lake trout, and had one lake trout dinner (could have had two, but had to eat our steaks) while camped there. Weather was wet for the first three days, but cleared out for most of the rest of the trip.

6 portages out through the Kek ponds and Eddy Lake into the South Arm of Knife where we snagged the beach campsite, a primo site. 5 nights in the South Arm, and we ate fish every night. So 6 of our 9 nights we had fresh caught fish, 3 lake trout, two smallmouth bass, and one northern meal. All delicious.

This was the trip of the big lake trout - I caught a very large one, and George caught a humongus one. Both were great and long fights, with line peeling off the reel numerous times. I had three other large ones on, but one broke off, and the other two came off, but all three peeled line numerous times before coming off.

This was also another trip for wildfires. Last year there was a huge wildfire in the BWCA. This year there were several small fires going near Vera Lake, which was closed off when we started out on the trip (we originally planned on doming back through Vera, not the South Arm). There was also a wildfire just over the border in Canada, maybe a few miles from where we were camped, and that fire grew in intensity on a very windy day. A float plane kept flying over, and it turns out it was ferrying in Forest Service crews, as our last night on the South Arm, a two person Forest Service crew motored up to our camp to let us know they were closing the South Arm (along with a number of other lakes). We were moving the next day anyway,so no real change in plans.

So yet another great trip - Back thru Illinois on the way home to check in with my folks, sister Denise, and cousin Pat.

For those of you keeping track of the mileage on the trusty Accord, I drove 3100 miles on the trip, and turned the odometer over 229,000 miles.

Let's see those big trout!