Sunday, the canoe trip begins:
Sometime around 4AM it started raining on us. I know the approximate time because we had left the fly partly off the tent (so we could see out the windows) and I had to run out in my underwear to pull it down. (The rainfly, not my underwear.)

By 7AM it was raining hard. We decided the best course of action was to throw everything in the car and get back up to Sawbill but quick. We threw the disassembled tents on the roof since they were so wet and crammed everything else in and were soon back at Sawbill.
Here's a picture of the ride up to Sawbill:


The workshop was open and unoccupied so we went in there to repack everything which worked out well. I lectured everyone to watch out for people (Bill Hansen) trying to put random objects into our packs but the rain seemed to keep the snoosers away.


After some visiting with Bill and Cindy and checking on the weather everything went back in the car, canoes went on the roof, we made one last swing through the store for breakfast (Egekvist donuts and OJ) and we were off to Kawishiwi.

The drive was uneventful, we unloaded on the landing, took the traditional pre-trip team photo
and hit the water.
Our goal was to get to Malberg for the first night and then figure out where to go next.
The water was extremely low, I've never seen it so low. In the boggy areas going north out of Kawishiwi we were practically dragging on the bottom all the time and most of the portages were extended because you couldn'’t paddle all the way to the normal portage.

To make matters worse after about 3 or 4 portages we caught up with a group of four canoes and 9 dingdongs that we couldn'’t get around for a while. They were very slow getting across the portages and in the narrow channels we were in we couldn't pass them on the water. Once we got to a bigger lake we zipped right around them and then met up with another group of 9 on the next portage. They weren't as annoying and let us go right around them, although they did do some kind of weird chant before launching from the portage.

I thought maybe we should develop our own team chant, and Rob had a great suggestion unfortunately it's far too profanity ridden to print here. If you'd like to hear it sometime let me know and I'll recite it for you. For some reason Carrie and Sandy didn't seem to think we were the kind of group that needed a chant so we dropped the topic. After we got north of Polly lake we didn't seem to see many people anyway so it would have only been wildlife that would have been able to enjoy our chant.

On the portage into Malberg we stopped and walked around the river that's usually flowing along the portage, it turns out the water was so low there were only a few puddles in the riverbed. I've never seen it like that.

Eventually we moved on toward the campsite we wanted, a high rocky site overlooking a narrow channel just west of the center of Malberg. As we paddled up to the site in the rain an otter was checking us out. He'd dive and then come back up periodically to do his little sneezing thing at us. We set up camp and made spaghetti for dinner.

We hadn't really made up our minds where to go from this point so I suggested some options and then left the other three to work it out. The final decision was that we would go up to Little Saganaga and then back to Sawbill.