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After getting up a little later than usual, we had another wonderful granola breakfast and paddled the 200 yards to the next portage. This incredibly long, rocky portage offered several places with moose-muck to slither through. The pond that followed it brought us to the next portage, which was much longer than the last, but at least not as rocky. We made good time through both portages that everyone up here calls the 'B&B' (B***h and B*****d) and they certainly lived up to their names. We'd planned on going through North Portage to Bayley Bay on Basswood Lake, but learned from another group that it was knee to thigh deep in moose-muck and we'd be better off detouring to Singing Brook Portage, which we floated, to Burke Lake. We stopped for lunch on an island and then pushed onto the 84-rod portage called the Yellow Brick Road. This is a sandy, cleared trail with no obstacles that is flat … a real change of pace for us. Many of us believed this was what all our portages in Quetico would be like, before we got here. We reached Bayley Bay to find the wind in our faces with waves the size of what we went through on Agnes and a storm front off in the far distance. As soon as we rounded a point and left the cove, we entered Basswood Lake's main body and ran into 3-foot swells that were mounting as the storm approached. After another ¾-mile, with all canoes taking on water over the bow and sides, the Coleman and Weirich boats made it around another small point and got to shore. The Luff Boat was furthest from the shoreline and ended up having to back the canoe to shore and walk in the water with it untill close to the point, where Michael C., Jerry C., and Chase Mc. walked over the rise to help out. There was no way around the point with the canoe loaded (waves were breaking and sending spray 10 feet in the air). Once the gear was out, Jerry and Mark jumped in the canoe and made it around the point, to join the rest of the crew on shore. The storm approached very quickly, so we unloaded all the canoes, pulled the boats out of the water, set up a rain fly, put rain suits on over our soaked clothes and then stowed the gear and ourselves under the fly. The temperature dropped during the two-hour rain. We passed the time playing cards and just laying about resting. Within minutes of getting a fire going to warm us up, the rain stopped and the sun came out so we reloaded the canoes and headed out. The waves had dropped to a foot high and we pushed ourselves hard to get across the bay before the wind picked up again. Every campsite we passed was filled with no place left for us. Being the main entry are into Quetico, we saw more people that afternoon than we'd seen the entire trip. Finally got to Prairie Portage at the same time as a coed group of rowdy teenagers, so we made it a race to get through the portage before them … partly concerned they'd get to a campsite on the Canadian side before us and partly to get away from the mosquito swarms laying ambush on the trail. We paddled to an island on Birch Lake and set up camp. Funny thing was, this is the same island we stopped on to eat lunch our first day out. Today, we finished up with 78.6 miles showing on the GPS (which is a little misleading because we were only recording the distance we'd paddled, had missed a couple of small lakes and hadn't measured our portages). Everyone is exhausted and starting to wind down because we know we'll be back at base camp tomorrow. Dinner is macaroni, cheese and ham scavenged from previous lunches and dinners … and Mr. Coleman turned it into a feast … three great dinners in a row. We've done great even being short of food and we have enough left over for tomorrow. This campsite turned out to be very nice with a pine needle floor to sleep on and enough room to separate the tents and kitchen area. The bear bags weighed next to nothing and went up very easy, once we got the ropes up in the trees.