Camped at: Starrett Lake Campground
Friday:
We left Madison at about 4:30 PM, hitting some slow traffic due to intermittent road construction all the way to Minocqua. The traffic cleared up after Portage, but slowed down every time we hit a construction zone. Although the weather was supposed to be pretty clear, it became apparent by the black skies and lightening on the horizon that we were driving right into a thunderstorm that was over Minocqua. A quick check of the phone confirmed that hail-producing thunderstorms were blowing through just then, so we decided to take shelter in the Minoqua Wal-Mart. I had forgotten to grab my fleece jacket on my way out the door, so I took the opportunity to snag a sweatshirt. It’s blue and says “Minocqua” on it, and I am absolutely not worried about it getting trashed.
We set up in the rain, which isn’t ideal but something we’ve done a time or two before. We are planning a trip to the BWCA near the end of June, so we’re using these weekend NHAL trips to knock off the rust. And wow, we have a lot of rust to remove. We forgot: My fleece, one of my prescriptions, the precious Bailey’s Irish cream for my coffee (NOOO), and a drying cloth for dishes. None of these were catastrophic, but all could have been avoided had I not been rushing around grabbing a few things at the last minute.
Happily, we slept pretty well as it was warmer out. The peepers were out and peeping, and we saw about 20 frogs hanging out at the edge of the water by the lights of our flashlights.
Saturday:
We breakfasted on coffee, oatmeal, and dried fruit, which is one of my favorite camp breakfasts. Not only is it nice and warm on a cold morning, it’s filling and really gets things going, if you know what I mean. I think I’ll add some cashews or almonds to oatmeal in the future for more protein.
Nobody was at the Manitowish River, where we put in above the dam. We bought minnows in Minocqua the night before, and I caught a crappie with those within about 10 minutes. We decided to head to Manitowish River Site 13, which is a favorite of ours as it’s relatively farther away from the first three campsites above the dam. The downside is that there are some cabins across the river from site 13, but they’ve generally been pretty quiet. Sean went ahead and cleaned the crappie and iced it while I put lunch together. We had taco mac and cheese, which I think I’ll try making with boxed mac ‘n’ cheese in the future. (I had to cheat a little and use penne and powdered cheese which was edible but not amazing.) We poked around the site just a little to see if we could find any morels, but nothing showed up. We put the crappie head and guts into Sean’s new crawfish trap to see if we could get anything in that, but ended up empty at the end of the day when we picked it up on the way home.
The wind really picked up in the afternoon, and we were unfortunately reminded of a big problem this flowage has in the spring: when the weeds haven’t grown in , you can’t see the channel very well. This flowage was created when the Manitowish River was dammed, and the flooded area includes a lot of stump fields, many of which are just out of sight under water. Those, plus the wind, meant we had a couple of pretty dicey moments of being hung up on stumps. Undaunted, we pressed on to try and find Manitowish River Site 12, which we had not yet been able to find. Across from our lunch spot at site 13 is a small channel that leads to the upper part of the flowage, and the very nice site 12 is all by itself up there. No development, either! On the way to 12, we saw seven trumpeter swans farther up the river. They took off when we got closer, and we watched them gain altitude over the water for some time. They are enormous birds, and I’m glad to admire them from a distance.
After stopping for a quick break at site 12, we decided to turn around and head back. The wind was pretty chilly, and we weren’t having any luck fishing other than the one morning crappie. We had some dinner and warmed up at Aqualand, which serves pretty decent pizza and has a good brewpub. After that, we headed over to Blueberry Lake, which Sean assures me is “full of panfish.” I have not yet caught a single panfish in that little lake, and this time was no exception. So, we decided to check out Emerald Lake, which is within walking distance from the Firefly campground but relatively unknown and generally good largemouth territory for us. Our intrepid Honda Accord bounced its way down the fire road to the walk-in trail for that lake, but we found that it was occupied by some teenagers hauling out a jon boat. Not wanting to fight our way past each other, we decided to put the canoe on Firefly, which we didn’t have any luck in. By this time I was pretty chilly, so we decided to pack it in for the day and go build ourselves a nice warm fire at camp.
The temps got all the way down to the high 30’s that night, which is about my limit. Sean can pretty much sleep at any temperature.
Sunday
We slept a little late, so fishing early didn’t quite happen. After our same breakfast of (black! ARGH!) coffee and oatmeal + dried fruit, we broke camp. I noticed that we need to replace the interior tarp in our tent, as it’s starting to smell a little funky. One of the most helpful things we ever did to keep our tent dry was to line the interior of the tent with a plastic painter’s tarp. Any moisture that wicks in from the outside is stopped by that tarp; it just needs some replacing once in a while.
We decided to try going back to Emerald Lake, and found it empty of teenagers and jon boats. We could see largemouth cruising around from the shore, and decided that we’d bring in the canoe and try our luck. With bobbers and worms, we caught several smaller largemouth, as well as a couple of nice sized pumpkinseeds, which we put on the stringer. Sean tried out his topwater frog lure, which is fun and got some hits, but it doesn’t have a great hook rate. We decided to paddle troll back to the landing, and were almost back when Sean hooked into the biggest fish of the trip – a 13.5″ largemouth, which struck on a 4″ rappela. That seems to be about the bigger end of the size in this lake – not a ton of monster bass, but a good number of fun mid-sized ones.
We ate lunch at the Firefly Lake picnic area, where we re-hydrated some beef, instant rice, and ratatouille, which was my attempt to combine and get rid of a few things. It ended up being kind of bland, but we had grabbed some season salt for any possible crawfish prep and we jazzed it up a little bit with that. And by 4:30, we were on the road home.
Till next time, NHAL! ❤
Tippy Canoe Tales 