12 miles, 5 portages, 345 rods

Three fairly easy portages with the company of other groups and we arrived at Fraser. It was a gorgeous sunny day and the wind FINALLY died down for a while. Nice lunch on a rocky campsite in the sun and lovely paddling all afternoon with no portaging for several hours. Without the wind it was easy to have conversations in the canoe, which was a nice change.

We paddled up to several rocks with seagulls on them and realized they had nests on them and very fuzzy baby seagulls which neither of us had seen before. Very cute. One parent tried to divert our picture-taking attention by flying around us. We then went through Kiana, my favorite BW lake because of its twists, turns, and cool plants, lichens and rocks. At the far side portage we met up with out first OB group, a bunch of students from a Paducah, KY housing project. They weren’t too happy about their backcountry experience and had a hard time believing we would do this for a vacation. It was fun to see the instructors who were excited to talk to outside people.

Just as we hit Insula it started to rain. We pulled out and put on our turtle suits, and Jason put up a decent rain tarp, which we used to cook and eat dinner under. We tried to come up with a good Crazy Creek (camping chair) song, but only ½ succeeded. With more wind and rain we went to bed on what turned out to be Jason’s favorite day of the trip.