After Sandpoint, we did a brief detour and headed northwest to the Priest Lake area on a recommendation from Jason Wilde, our financial planner at Northwestern.  Great call, Jason, they don’t call this the “Gem of Idaho” for no reason, it’s beautiful and quite easily the most peaceful place we’ve landed over the last 3 weeks.  By the way, we laughed out loud just yesterday as we recognized that EVERY day of the  last 3 weeks have been spent in the state of Idaho.  That doesn’t sound all that adventurous, I know, but this state is beautiful and it’s big, very big, with lots of great places to see.  Beyond that, we have plenty of time, and we are executing “the plan”.   Back to Priest Lake…we camped 2 nights right on the lake at Osprey Campground.  MJ gets the baking credits for this stop, as she delivered fresh homemade (out of a bag) muffins to the table.  We drug our paddleboards 100 feet into the beautiful water of Priest Lake and enjoyed a 2-mile paddle as I trolled a massive fly in tote with the full expectation of catching a Kokanee salmon.  Johnny, big flies catch big fish, don’t they?   Well, I settled for a (small) smallmouth instead, at least I didn’t get skunked.  I redeemed myself that evening as I fished on Priest River right up the street.  Small caddis hatch helped me land a nice fat cuttbow right out of the blocks.   As the hatch ended, I went deep with a nymph rig.  As I did, I had this feeling that somebody or something was watching me.  In between sips of white wine, MJ alerted me to a large bald eagle that had landed in a tree across the river, less than 100 feet away.  He watched me as I put on a Mountain Whitefish clinic, seemingly stunned by the number of fish that I was dredging out of “his pool”.   Seriously,  he was watching me “like a hawk”, so I made an extra attempt to splash around every fish I landed, which clearly caught his attention even more.  Recalling an episode of Grizzly Adams from 1977 (sorry millennials), I got this crazy idea that I was going to handfeed this beast.  So, when I caught my next Whitefish, I placed him up on shore, and shockingly, the eagle left his perch and swooped down on the beached fish, only to reject it at the last moment.  After I alerted my film crew (MJ on vino), I threw the fish into the center of the pool.  Amazingly enough, the eagle left its perch for a second time, circled around the head of the pool, and made a pass in low before diving in the water and retrieving the fish with its talons!  Then he flew downstream and landed in another tree with the fish in hand.  Totally cool, AND, all of it was caught on film and within 100 feet of where we were standing.  Apparently, one can’t post videos on WordPress without the premium subscription, so MJ posted the videos on Instagram. Our technical team will report back to you.  Incidentally, if you were wondering, Grizzly Adams was actually produced by some folks from Park City and parts of the film were actually shot in the Uintas, the Wasatch, and Park City.  True story, and my plan is to resurrect his lifestyle, as evidenced by way I manhandled this bird.  Grizzly Adams lives on, in a George Costanza sort of way.