Day four. We woke up to fog. Now, we'd had fog the day before, but we could see for at least 500m. Not only that, it lifted for a few hours in the afternoon (long enough for me to get a sunburn on my face as a result of my afternoon lounging on the unattended air mattress on the rocks.) But this... this was... well, it was Lake Superior. Also, it was a good opportunity to navigate by compass, as we had a couple of crossings to do in order to get to the Swede Island area. With no wind, negligible magnetic declination, and deck compasses on all our boats, navigating by bearing would be easy (particularly so if I have a GPS as backup!) But it would also mean that we'd have to stay closely together. I suggested that perhaps today was not the day to fish, at least until we got to our campsite for the night (because then *I* would not have to sit and drift while fishing occurred! It makes sense!)
To speed things up, we had oatmeal for breakfast. And then, we packed our boats. And then Jim pulled out his book again, and David and I made cracks about getting calluses on the bases of our thumbs from twiddling them so much and I may have said something about the gradations of slowness, and how slower than f***ing slow was Kevin. And David may have repeated this to Kevin, who may have laughed. And then David and I looked at some maps, and Jim read another chapter of his book. And then we launched! And paddled! And it was good!
And then we got to the island where I'd wanted to take a quick break because my annotated map said Pukaskwa Pit. It was noon-ish, so we figured we might as well have lunch and Kevin went fishing or something. Jim, David and I explored the spooky cobble beach: high terraces of cobbles, and burned over some years ago. With the fog, it felt a little creepy. And then, we waited for Kevin to come back from fishing so we could eat lunch. This time, I really did pull out my book after a while. And then I looked at the map, and got a little concerned about how we weren't making any progress. I wasn't feeling so relaxed, I was feeling impatient.
After lunch, we poked our way through Loon Harbour. Jim and I got out of our boats at the sauna on Swede Island, because it was interesting, but by this time I was serious about wanting to make more distance so I didn't even consider suggesting we stop for a schwitz - no time! let's go! let's go find a site further on! Further on, we learned that the less exposed shorelines of this area have few campsite possibilities. The closest site that I knew of (as per my maps) was on Shesheeb Point, and it wasn't annotated with a smiley face like all the primo campsites were. But it was getting on to five p.m., and I wanted off the water. Kevin, on the other hand, wanted a fish, so the fishing rod came out again. After about 20 minutes of this, I considered that my back hurt, that I was sick of sitting around in a kayak, and I didn't care if the site was only meh, I wanted to go there, and I wanted to go there now. This I told David and Jim, and Jim and I set out for it. And yes, it was meh (a narrow pebble beach with a view of some more fog), and yes, Kevin caught two more fish, and yes, I feel all torn about being cranky about having to wait around for the fishing and happy that we have fish.
That night, though, cranky won. I expressed my extreme frustration with the sitting and waiting followed by more sitting and more waiting and then more of the same, and that I did not like our lack of progress on the map since I was now worried that there wouldn't be time to do the other things we wanted to do later in the trip. Kevin's description of my expressing extreme frustration was along the lines of "blowout", which just makes me laugh, because of course the rants that were in my head were *much* more vocal and *much* crankier. (And then, cause I'm all class, I ate some fish that Kevin cooked. And this unbelievably yummy array of tempura vegetables that David made. With chopsticks! David actually brought chopsticks!)
Also, David and I went looking for a fork - apparently of voyageur provenance - but we never found it. We did, however, find lots of low-quality amethysts in the basalt all around us. That excited me. I started replacing the weight my boat lost when I drank beer with rocks I picked up. And tomorrow, tomorrow we were going to launch early! And we would paddle!