Day 8 - Power Portage

Sucher’s Camp - Map 3

River mile 1173

Days Milage - 25.2 miles

Total miles -  168.9 miles

Before I talk about the day, let me just praise our river angels Sandy and Jeff. This morning, they fed us their famous paddlers breakfast, which consists of Blueberry pancakes (picked fresh by our hosts) with maple syrup that Jeff made from his maple trees, eggs and sausage. So good! Just one final example of how awesome our angel hosts are.

The challenge today was two portages around dams, the first one Pokegama Lake which was pretty short. I was able to float onto on portage wheels and carry everything in one trip.

The second one was Blandin Dam portage, this one was almost a mile. Assisting us was my friend from the twin cities John LaPlant. He was able to help us all our gear and boats to the put in areas, next to the local library. 

John was gracious enough to drive us to the local camping store to replace some damaged items for Jon and Bill. He also gave us a ride to Subway so we could have a late lunch before getting back in our boats at 4:30 pm. Thank you again John. 

We had 6 miles to our campsite at Sucher’s Camp. It was still hot, temps in the 80’s. As Jon and I paddled along around river mile 1175, we saw a flash of lightning and a couple seconds later a super loud clap of thunder. We got close to shore, just as we did we saw a bolt of lightning hit just a mile or so ahead. Since we had already gotten to shore we immediately got out of our boats to wait out the storm. Well, once the lightning passed is started just DUMPING down rain. We paddled in the downpour all the way to camp, another 45 minutes. All I could do was laugh, we definitely got the cool down we were hoping for! Just a few hundred yards upstream from camp we came across Bill who had also pulled off the river to take shelter.

Unloading the boats in the rain was a bummer, but it did taper off over the next hour. Soon, the sun was out and we were setting up our tents and getting our gear organized.