Boundary Bound

[Dwayne_Delaney]

Heading up to Boundary Waters this weekend to spend 5 nights on some lakes in the boonies. I am hoping that the weather won't be too wet and/or cold. Should be fun regardless, I have been wanting to make the trek to the park for some time. A guy that I work with and some of his brothers and brother-in-laws have been planing the trip for a couple of months and one of his brothers had to back out at the last minute; of course I volunteered to take his place!

[sirgiovanni]

Take plenty of paca-crawls if you like small mouth. ;)

[john mills]

Just getting away, out to the boonies sounds great. It's harder any more to find space without man made noise.

[Dwayne_Delaney]

Had a great trip.

This was my first visit to the park so I didn't really know what to expect. Getting to the lake was pretty taxing with several rugged portages and quite a bit of paddling. The campsites at the lake (Four Town) were crowded with only a single site open at the far end of the lake when we arrived on Saturday. Most of the crowd cleared out Sunday and we had the lake to ourselves the rest of the time. We made some side trips to some of the other nearby lakes but spent most of the time on Four Town. I didn't see any bears or moose, but did see a badger, a mink, many beaver and on the last two nights we were awaken by wolves howling around the campsite.

Weather was pretty good; temps were in the mid-fifties during the day and dipped into the mid to low 30s at night. Wind kinda sucked a couple of days and we only had a few short showers.

Fishing was a little slow until someone out of desperation tried a buzzbait across some lily pads and found out what the Northerns couldn't resist. Luckily he had enough of the buzzbaits for all of us. After that, it got very interesting. This was my first encounter with Northern pike and I can best describe them as freshwater barracuda; a lot of teeth and a nasty temper. Caught several 30inch plus Northerns, some decent size smallies and even a nice largemouth. Didn't catch a single walleye though. One of the guys knew how to fillet the Northerns, so we had plenty of fish for our dinners.

Things I will do different next time:
Pack much lighter. - We should have done an inventory of the group before we left to avoid any duplication of gear and then split up the stuff amongst ourselves. We should have also used more dehydrated foods to lighten our food packs and planned meals to eliminate unused food.
Different canoe. - I used an older Old Town that was a good 20 pounds heavier than the Kevlar canoes available for rent from an outfitter. I appreciated not having to pay for renting the Kevlar canoe, but the lighter canoe would have made the portages easier.

I thoroughly enjoy my trip and wouldn't hesitate to make the trip again.

[Chris Norrick]

Brings back very fond memories of our trip in 2003. Glad things went fairly smoothly and you made it back in one piece.

[sirgiovanni]

i freeakin love Canada! Thanks for sharing your pics man.

[Don Armstrong]

Oh man. You guys are killing me! The last time I went on a good fishing trip was before I had gray hair.

Great pics!