Wednesday, day four.
This was going to be a little longer day so we were a bit more businesslike in the morning, plus we had developed something of a system by this point. We ate our oatmeal and got packed up and on the water relatively quickly. At some point during the packing up the twin engine airplane showed up doing it's twice hourly fly-by. Just before we left we decided to do one more team photo.

As we paddled down the long southeast arm of Little Sag we went past an island that had a bunch (like 20) of new latrines stacked up in plain sight on the shore. They were a new style, still fiberglass but boxier than the old ones. We were kind of irritated that they left them laying out in the open like that, it always used to be that they'd hide stuff like that back in the woods until they were ready to use it.

There was fire damage all along the left hand shore, but it was a bit more spotty than it had been in the northeast corner of the lake. There were lots of cedars along the shoreline that had been spared. On the portage we couldn't really see any signs of the fire but once were out on Mora (the next lake) we could see it again. It was spotty but you could see significant pockets of damage all along the northern parts of the lake.

We turned south here heading for Mesaba and away from the fire zone, although we could still see that plane circling the fire for a few more lakes.

The weather was great all day and we were making good time so we didn't stop to eat lunch until we got to our site on Mesaba. There aren't any great sites on this lake, we stayed in the center one. Rob and Carrie went swimming again, I can't remember if Sandy went or not. I took a nice nap in Rob's hammock. Later Rob conked out in the hammock and I snuck up on him and took some pictures, I think he was in a coma again.

In the afternoon we watched a beaver swim back and forth past our site. Later we were entertained by Loonapalooza, named by Rob. This consisted of three adult loons having some kind of disagreement. It appeared that two of the loons were trying to chase away or escape from the third one it wasn't totally clear which. There was lots of splashing and calling, eventually they all three flew away to continue their disagreement elsewhere or go their separate ways, again, I'm not sure which.

Dinner for Rob and I was a Lipton noodles and chicken-y sauce to which we added a retort pouch of chicken. Sandy and Carrie had some beans-n-tortillas thing they concocted, there was gas.