Bait, De-bait, and Re-bait

As per our usual, we spent about three hours today, from late morning to early afternoon, sitting in the boat baiting, de-baiting, and re-baiting our hooks. We go through many minnows in our quest to fill our freezer with fish for the winter. Today, Tom, Leah, and I added another 11 fish to our stockpile (10 perch and 1 rock bass). We started out by Star Island but only caught one in the first hour, so we moved over to our usual spot by the Potato Islands where we pulled in ten more.

No, this isn’t bait! This is Leah, winning the “littlest fish” award!

Chloe, who’s not into fishing but is into coffee, has spent the past two mornings driving into Bemidji to sit at a cute little coffee shop she found. She’s doing some volunteer work for a Greek translation project, searching for jobs, and filling out applications. And drinking coffee, of course.

The haze in the area continues and in fact, was worse today, possibly due to a forest fire north of Bemidji. When our cousins went out to Ruttger’s for dinner last night they saw planes scooping up water from the lake before flying overhead to go douse the fires. It’s very dry throughout the area and the danger of fires is at a dangerously high level.

I spent the afternoon reading. I’ve been fascinated with the book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”. We had an early supper of Crock Pot Santa Fe Chicken (which I had started this morning before fishing), after which, Tom set out for another bike ride and I went on a nice long walk. I reached 10,000 steps while listening to my other book (“The Dutch House”).

After we both hit our exercise goals, we undid them by going to the lodge for ice cream. Oh well! What’s a vacation at the lake without ice cream?