Spooks

Do walleyes inhabit your lake? If so, you are privileged. I mean no disrespect to other game fish. It’s just that walleyes are the essence of Northwoods angling. We have plenty of them here at Birch Lake, near Harshaw, Wisconsin. They run a little small; on a good day you need to sort through several to find a couple that meet the 15-inch legal size limit (and I never keep more than a couple).

I am glad they’re here; at times I even prefer fishing for them instead of the trophy smallmouth bass that also inhabit this 180-acre lake. Why should this be so? Fishermen love a fight, and nothing battles like smallmouths. In the warm-water days of summer, when they feel the bite of a hook, they will leap two or three feet clear of the water. They will pull, race, dive and thrash, battle you to a stalemate for minutes at a time.

Walleyes, on the other hand, come along somewhat peacefully. They’ll tend to hold deep for a while but then grudgingly give in. They’re not a threat to take your jig and tear it clean off your 6-pound-test line. What, then, is the attraction? Well, of course, they’re the best-tasting freshwater fish alive: You toss a 30-cent minnow or leech into the water, you reel in $10.99-a-pound seafood. It’s a pretty nice bargain.

But there’s more to it than that. You surely like walleyes for your own reasons; I have mine. And especially at this time of year, early season, cool to cold water, it’s the finesse it takes to catch them. I set up over a favorite rock bar. I know (or hope) they are down there, but I also know they’re stealthy, those greenish-gold spooks with eyes like precision-ground lenses. A northern pike will strike a bait with the savagery of a wolf. Walleyes, well, I’m not at all sure how they manage to be so light on the take. They seem to lift that bait from the rocks with the touch of a pickpocket, and pick your pocket they will, in a manner of speaking, if you’re not completely attuned.

I slip a minnow onto a jig, cast it out and, a few inches at a time, with an occasional twitch, draw it back across the rocks. Through the sensitive graphite rod I can feel every bump of lead-head on stone and sense the tug of every weed. I wait for a sensation that is just a bit different, a subtle tap-tap, or sometimes just a bit of extra weight that ever so slightly pulls back when lifted. A snap of the wrist then, and I am fast to a fish. The other night the walleyes were biting so light that detecting a strike had as much to do with noting the movement of the line where it met the water as with the vibrations coming through the rod to the cork grip in my hand.

In high summer, they are less subtle, but their bite is still distinctive, even when fishing with a leech on a slip bobbers. A smallmouth will lustily grab the leech and swim off, the bobber suddenly tracking left or right and downward. When a walleye comes calling, the bobber will twitch, pause, and then go down. What happened was that the fish nosed up to the bait, stopped, inhaled it with a jet of water through the gills, paused for just an instant, and moved deliberately on.

Early-season jigging, though, is the way to experience walleyes. It forces me, if I want to take a fish or two home, to be fully in the moment. The wise have said that it is impossible to fish and worry at the same time. True enough in my experience, but where spring walleyes are concerned, it is impossible to catch fish without being nearly in the state of zen.

As for tangible rewards, a meal of fresh-caught walleyes may not qualify as a sacred feast, but it’s close. Here’s wishing you a few of those as you enjoy your lake this year.

Dark at night: What a concept

How dark is it in your lake after the sun goes down? Is it truly dark so that the sky blazes with stars? Or do lights on the ends of piers, or lights leading up people’s stairs, obscure the lights in the sky?

If you’re like most of us, the latter is true. I remember years ago, after four years of attending college in the middle of a city, I drove to a cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where my family was taking a week’s vacation. This cabin had no electricity; interior light came from kerosene and gas-mantle lamps. The lake was also rather isolated and the cabins on its shore widely spaced.

On arriving, well after sunset, I pushed out onto the lake in a rowboat. It must have been a new moon night, because my eyes immediately were drawn upward – I had never seen (or couldn’t remember seeing) stars so bright and so numerous. I appreciated for the first time the spectacle of the Milky Way; I easily picked out favorite constellations. I gazed at the sky for a long time. It was incredibly peaceful; also awe-inspiring.

Such views are becoming rare these days because we insist on lighting the places where we live, even we don't really need the light. A long-time friend, Dan Heim, from near Phoenix, Arizona, writes now and then about this problem on his astronomy blog, Sky Lights (http://heimhenge.com/skylights/). It’s called light pollution.

Of course, light pollution is most acute in cities, but even here in Wisconsin’s lake country, it’s very much in evidence, and not just within the orbit of the little towns. On a lake such as ours – Birch Lake at Harshaw, Wisconsin – it takes just few bright lights along the shoreline to create a glare that impedes the view of the night sky. As it happens, just a few people leave pier lights or yard lights on all night – for what reason I have no clue. If they were to turn them off, we would have spectacular stargazing, because we are 10 miles from the nearest town and have no streetlights nearby.

One thing I am considering on our lake is to try organizing a monthly “lights out” night, where all the lights go off for an hour or two after, say, 10 p.m. I haven’t tried this yet, because we’re pretty new to the lake and I don’t want to be seen as an intruder trying to tell long-time residents how to run their lives. But as I get to know more people here, a may give it a shot.

Have you tried any such thing on your lake? Let me know what you’ve attempted and how well it has worked. And in the meantime, if you are at all interested in astronomy, I highly recommend subscribing to my friend Dan’s blog.

Bass beds, no strikes. What’s the deal?

If your lake contains smallmouth bass, spawning season probably has started, or will soon. It has started on our lake (Birch, near Harshaw, Wisconsin). My brother and I noticed spawning beds while fishing earlier this week. We cast to several of them with severely limited results.

Now, it is said that catching smallmouths (or largemouths for that matter) from spawning beds is so easy as to be un-sporting. That is true, but only at the right time in the spawning cycle. On our lake, the water temperature has just edged into the lower 60s F, which is the trigger point for spawning.

When this happens, the males move into the shallows and use their tail fin to sweep away sand and expose gravel to create a circular spawning bed, slightly bowl-shaped and two to four feet in diameter. The males then wait for females to arrive.

At this stage, the male bass are not the least bit interested in food. They spend the time after ice-out (the period known as pre-spawn) feeding heavily, but when spawning time arrives, they basically quit eating. A friend, master wood carver and sometime sculptor of language, Tom Tittl of Manitowoc, explained this time of food abstinence as clearly as anyone could. Throwing bait in front of a spawning bass, he said, “is like someone offering you a hamburger while you’re in the throes of passion.”

Once the male finds a mate and the eggs are laid and fertilized, the male’s job is to guard the nest (and later the fry) for a couple of weeks. Here is where the fishing gets exciting. It’s not that the bass have started eating again. It’s that they aggressively attack and remove anything that encroaches on the nest where the eggs lie on the bottom incubating. That includes a lure dragged across the bed or a leech or nightcrawler dangled above it.

There are some who say anglers should leave spawning bass alone. Others say that if released unharmed, the bass return almost immediately to the nest and no harm is done. For my part, I like to work the beds a little, just for the thrill of catching (and releasing) a few of these incredibly powerful, acrobatic fish in the early season. Mostly I prefer to leave them alone and let the reproductive process play out.

Now as I ponder the spawning ritual, I can’t help asking: How many women wish their men would behave more like smallmouths – males who make the bed and take care of the kids?