Day 11: August 12, 2012

After breakfast today, we hiked straight to Lake Ojibway with all of our sanitized gear! We had to do a tiny bit of backwoods hiking, but not much- the hike wasn't bad at all compared to the other ones we've done. The lake looked really interesting at first glance, because the surface of a lot of the water was completely covered in a plant that I later found out was called Brasenia schreberii.

It was pretty much everywhere.

Brasenia has a male flower...

...and a female flower!

And it has its own natural "slime" type of stuff on the bottoms of its leaves. The tops are waxy!

Could be that the slime has spa-like properties? :P

There were still Nuphar plants scattered in there...

And some Nymphaea odorata  (top-white) and Utricularia (above-yellow)...

And a pitcher plant!!

But it was definitely mostly Brasenia.

Our first sampling station, before we started swimming through the Brasenia!

At first, I thought that it would be really fun compared to our other lakes- the leaves and flowers were so pretty, and walking through them felt really cool! However, as soon as we started needing to swim and gather samples, it wasn't so fun anymore. :P Our feet got tangled up in the floating vines, and it became hard to make any kind of progress in moving through the lake. But we figured it out eventually! It was also a pretty cold, dark lake since the leaves of the Brasenia covered the water, making it almost impossible for light to get through to the bottom. And to get sediment porewater samples, we had to first get our core sampler past the thick mat of stems on the bottom of the lake. It was certainly a challenge!!

All ready to go!!

Swimming through stems, stems, stems, and more stems! My face says a lot about how easy it was.

Water Column Sampling!!

Me with a species of Potamogeton!! :)

The sediment water sampling was tough!!

                                             

You can't really see the babies, but there's their momma!

We saw a moose with two babies on the other side of a small cove in the lake!! They were closer than the ones that we saw before in Moskey basin. So we've seen 5 moose in total now! Wow. :)

At one point in the lake, I looked down and saw leeches swarming around me like sharks around a shark tank. o_O Angela asked if I wanted the camera, but I said no. Didn't really feel like immortalizing that moment on film, hahaha. I'm a lot less frightened of lots of things after spending time on the island though! I'm not really too scared of spiders or yellow jackets anymore, and the fear of leeches is wearing off too! Look at how brave the island makes you. :)

Leeeeeeeeeeech

We also decided while swimming out of the lake that the four of us are superheroes. Angela is the Fearless Leader, Jennifer is Super Sass, I'm The Facemaker, and Rachel is... Batman. Seriously though. :P

Hiked back from Ojibway to Daisy, and we immediately loaded up the canoes and rowed back to Mott Island for processing! Even though we were tired, we knew that it would be worth it to get there as soon as we could, while the weather was relatively nice. After getting there safely, we filtered all of our water samples and treated ourselves to some s'mores! Delicious!! :D

Before going to bed, I found a leech on my sleeping bag! Not exactly sure how that happened, sine I had been out of the water for over 7 hours. But I got a video of him! The way that they move is pretty cool.

Hope that there are no more... o_O