Day 3

Catfish - Nipissing

The plan for Day 3 was to head for the Nipissing River via Luckless Lake.  We were up early and really looking forward to the day ahead.  It was beautiful morning and we couldn't have asked for a better day weather wise.

Early morning pose 

As we approached the portage for Luckless I jumped out of the canoe and walked up on shore.  There was the biggest gardener snake I have ever seen!!!!  It actually scared the hell out of me.  Brandon tried to catch it but it got away.  As we began to unload our canoes we heard a crash to our left.  As we looked up we couldn't believe our eyes.  There within 50 feet of us was a cow and calf moose.  We took a ton more pictures but this is the best of the bunch.

Ted with cow and calf

All 4

All ready to go

The Big One (2835P)

Brandon

Ted

Here we stopped for a break on THE portage 2835P.  Luckily I had some good advice before we ventured on this trip.  We were originally going to do the reverse loop however someone told me this portage would be all uphill.  So we reversed it and on this day we were glad, the portage is quite wide and was easy trekking downhill.

Heading down the final stretch to the Nipissing

Ahhh, Finally on the Nipissing

As we headed down the Nipissing we were all captivated by this meandering river.  We all much prefer river travel to lake travel and finally we were here.  There are two sites between the Luckless Portage and the first portage on the Nipissing.  I had read from someone's trip report that one of the sites was elevated up on a hill with a great view of both direction.  Well the first site certainly wasn't it.  It had to have been one of the worst sites we've ever come across.  It was just a big open clearing with no shade and some form of old machinery laying around as well.  We continued on and found the site we were looking for.  It was a bit of a steep climb but it was as advertised.  The next two pics below are taken from the our site.

Looking North East

Looking South West

After setting camp it was time for some relaxing, this picture doesn't really show it well, but it was a pretty steep decent underneath me.

Rob in hammock

Sitting around

After a bit we decided to try our luck with some fishing, we found a small hole that seemed to have a lot of fish but we could only manage to pull out a bunch of small ones.

Ted fishing the Nip

If you look at the Canoe Route Map, just east of the Luckless portage the river balloons out quite a bit.  We ran into a Swedish couple with their teenage daughter, and they told us that in the evening this is where to go if you wanted to see Moose.  On a previous trip they counted 7 one night.  So we couldn't pass up the opportunity and headed back up the river after dinner.  Turns out we never did encounter any moose, however the fishing was great.  Just kept pulling in a ton of bass like below.  Either that or we just kept catching the same ones....

Moe and Brandon

One other thing I remembered from this night, as we headed back to camp, Moe and I decided we would continue on a little further down the river and keep fishing.  We didn't get all that far when we realized that is was all of a sudden pretty dark out.  Just as we came around a corner there were a ton of bats flying everywhere.  We immediately turned around and headed back.  However the bats seemed to have followed us a bit and it was pretty creepy there for a few minutes.

Later that night Brandon and Moe stayed up and watched an even better display of the Northern Lights than what we had seen earlier in the trip.  Brandon also made up a pretty neat ghost story about a guy by the name of Winston Scuttle.

Day 4