It was Jaden's turn in the hammock last night and he agreed that it better than the tent. While he was still sound asleep, I put on my berkley choppo for the first time all week and caught a 16" SMB from camp on the first cast. I knew under the right conditions I would like the addition of that lure to my arsenal, and I look forward to finding more fish with it.

The day started out fairly clear and windy. We fished and explored the north and east ends of Polly but only caught 3 small pike despite several hours of effort. Polly looks like it should be a very good pike lake but it sure didn't fish like it while we were there. We also trolled the area in the narrows between the islands and our campsite every time we passed through, but never caught the walleye we knew had to be there somewhere. Ultimately the wind ended up winning on this day as 25-30 mph gusts from the south convinced us to get off the water around lunch time.

In the early afternoon, we watched in absolute awe as a nature documentary happened right before our eyes. We were sitting on the logs around the fire grate waiting for a weather update from our SPOT and looked behind us to see a mass of large ants (guestimate of 500+) all moving together towards us. We thought we may have kicked an ant hill on the way over to sit down, but couldn't figure out exactly where they had suddenly come from in such a large group. The ants followed each others path, spread out along a line about 15 feet long and a foot wide, with a few dozen stragglers. They marched right past us, up and over the fire grate logs on one side, then up the rocky incline past it and into the woods. We stopped watching them when they got 10-15' into the woods figuring that was the end of it. About 40 minutes later they came back in a much more spread out line, practically single file, with almost every ant carrying an ant pupa. We watched them disappear one by one back into their apparent source- a decaying tree stump on the other end of camp. For whatever reason, that ant squad was the moving crew today. The total area they covered where we could see them was 40-45 yards long, and probably double that based on the time it took them to get back. Its hard to imagine what it would be like moving your "families" entire future survival from one place to another, but we could only shake our heads somewhat in disbelief that we had watched it happen.

By mid afternoon clouds had covered the sky, followed by some on and off light rain and lightning until dinner time, but most of the storm stayed north. The winds died down, switched directions lightly a couple times and then died out again. The rumble of thunder continued on and off all evening with scattered light rain here and there. We just sat under the cedars at the back of camp and mostly ignored it until the mosquitoes once again pushed us inside and to bed a bit early in preparation for leaving in the morning.