Eye to eye dragonfly

I wonder if the people who invented the helicopter drew inspiration from the dragonfly. The thought came to me recently when, while I was in the boat fishing, a red dragonfly parked itself in midair just a couple of feet from my eyes, then darted off.

Imagine: Flight without the imperative of forward speed and thrust. The ability to start, stop, rise, fall, hover, at any point in air, must have captivated creative aviation minds. The inventors couldn’t duplicate the dragonflies’ large wing surface area or their ultralight airframe, so they came up with rotors. Their machines, of course, can’t approach a dragonfly’s agility.

I don’t need to ask if your lake has dragonflies – it does, and likely several species. While we see them in the air and in terrestrial places, dragonflies are most assuredly water creatures. In fact they spend most of their lifecycle underwater, where few of us see them – only perhaps those who in summertime may thrash a metal-framed net around the bases of shoreline cattails or other plants to collect the nymphs for fishing bait. (I used to do that, and the nymphs, often incorrectly called hellgrammites, are deadly on bluegills.)

The dragonfly lifecycle typically lasts more than a year and can take as long as four or five years, depending on habitat quality and the availability of food for the nymphs. Adult dragonflies live only two to four months; the rest of the lifecycle is the nymph stage. After mating with a male (surely you have seen two dragonflies cruising around in tandem), the female lays tiny eggs, hundreds of them, on emergent plants, or sometimes directly into the water.

Newly hatched nymphs are carnivores – they have extendable jaws for catching small insects or plankton creatures. Nymphs breath through gills in their bodies. While they mainly get about on six legs, they can scoot ahead by issuing a jet of water through the anus. As nymphs grow, they shed their skin a dozen times or more (sort of like outgrowing and discarding suits of clothing) until they reach maturity. At that point (and who knows how they know?) the nymph grabs onto a reed or some other plant and climbs into the open air. There it begins to breathe. The skin breaks open behind the head and the adult dragonfly slowly emerges. It takes time for the dragonfly’s wings and body to dry – during that time it is vulnerable to all manner of predators. Ultimately, it takes off to begin its aerobatic life of feeding on midges, flies and, we fervently hope, mosquitoes.

You can find an excellent and much more detailed (and illustrated) description of the dragonfly lifecycle at http://citizenscientistsleague.com/2011/12/15/dragonfly-life-cycle-and-metamorphosis/. And of course you can simply appreciate the wonder of dragonfly aviation at any time, over the waters of the lake you love.

Better than the fireworks

Does your lake group have a July 4 fireworks display? Fireworks never look better than over water. But as Noelle and I sat on the pier bench yesterday at dusk, watching the fireworks over Birch Lake, something much more interesting happened. In the water where multicolored starbursts reflected, mayflies were surfacing, rising from the lake bottom, fluttering briefly, their wings, creating clearly visible ripples.

I'd focus on one at a time; more often than not a fish came up to take it. I tried guess the kind of fish from the size and sound of the swirl and the power of the gulp. I judged most of the takers to be bluegills, though our lake is sorely deficient in that species. The bigger surges likely came from smallmouth bass.

I don't know about you, but I get bored when a fireworks display runs on too long. Not so with watching fish feed during a mayfly hatch. Tonight there will be no fireworks, but there may still be mayflies, and with any luck I'll be there with my flyrod.

The $115,000 bass

We live here now in part because of a fish. I suppose my being bitten by the Northwoods bug at age 8 had something to do with it, as did 25 years of vacationing on this lake with our kids. But it was a largemouth bass that sealed the deal, that and some cosmic forces.

It was early August 2009, a Friday, the last day of our week's stay at Jung's Cottages here on Birch Lake near Harshaw, Wis. It was a warm, still grey afternoon, ideal for fishing. I climbed into the boat and leisurely motored straight across the lake. There, on shore, partly hidden by rushes (I call them "pencil reeds") stood a for sale sign.

Over the years Noelle and I had made it a practice, once during each week's Birch Lake vacation, to circle the lake in the boat and see what properties were for sale. In the early years of course we had no money to speak of and were merely window-shopping. As time went by, prices kept escalating, and so kept the dream of a lake cabin elusive. In recent years, though we had thought seriously about buying. We had even visited a couple of Birch Lake properties with a real estate agent and had debated purchasing a lot with a very small, quite run-down red cabin on it. But it was on the wrong end of the lake, was flanked by other run-down places, and seemed too expensive, the cabin essentially a tear-down, thus with negative value.

Around the same time, this lot with pencil reeds in front was available. It was heavily wooded with red oak, hemlock and a few majestic white pines. The top of its steep slope would afford a great panoramic view of the water. It had been for sale for a couple of years, at a price beyond our reach, but by August 2009, the asking price had come down by some $40,000 -- in other words, from "Are you kidding?" to "reasonable."

So, here I was, carrying years of wishing and hoping, on the last day of vacation, in pain at the prospect of leaving for home, floating beside this lot with its blue-and-white for sale sign. All right, I said to myself. If I catch a fish in front of this for sale sign, then we are destined to buy this property. I picked up a rod outfitted with a black-and-gold jointed Rapala floating plug and launched a cast that landed just where I had aimed it, right up against the edge of the pencil reeds. I twitched the bait a couple of times and...BAM! Just like that I was hooked into a bass. It turned to be a 19-inch largemouth, extremely well fed, beautifully colored with its black lateral stripe on deep green, a fish almost suitable for mounting if I'd been so inclined.

I slipped the bass back into the water unharmed, headed back to the cabin and told Noelle what had happened. We agreed that destiny had just called. A month later, in the full-color splendor of late September, we were back with the real estate agent, walking the site. The real estate slump had brought the price within reach. My business and my income had come through the great recession unscathed. We had the money. Circumstances had conspired. Three months later we sat around a table at a bank office in Minocqua and signed the papers.

The following April we parked a camper trailer on the land. That June we had a well and septic system installed. In April 2011 we held a ground-breaking, in a snowstorm, with our two kids and their significant others. By September we had our cabin -- in reality a small lake home, perfectly suited for year-round habitation. And so, in July 2013, here we are, full-time Northwoods dwellers.

And somewhere in Birch Lake, there swims a very expensive fish.

We live here now

We started visiting Birch Lake here at Harshaw, Wisconsin, some 25 years ago, when son Todd was three and daughter Sonya six. As of Friday, June 28, we live here full-time, in a house on a hill straight across the lake from the rental cottage where we spent a week each summer, usually during the week bridging July and August.

It was amazing how much of myself I used to invest in those one-week vacations, Saturday afternoon to the following Saturday morning. I saved vacation time like a miser to protect that full week. I looked forward to the vacation at Jung's Cottages; just after the first of I would begin counting the months, weeks and days -- as did wife Noelle and the kids.

Of course, the weeklong stays at Lakeside cottage flew by. I would play in the water with the kids, take them on hikes of canoe rides, read two or three good books, sneak out early mornings and dusky evenings for some walleye fishing. It was incredibly restful and restorative, but never nearly long enough.

Saturday's arrival meant unpacking (most of which Noelle did while I hit the beach with the kids). Sunday began with a trip into town to buy the week's groceries and have breakfast at Paul Bunyan's Cook Shanty in Minocqua -- that took care of half the day. After that we jealously guarded our time lakeside, making just a couple of side trips to town for a restaurant meal or a little shopping.

I counted the days down like a poor man watching the last of the food supply. By Wednesday evening, after fishing until dark, I would enter the mope mode, as only one full cottage day remained (Friday evening being tied up with packing the suitcases and pulling the boat out of the water. Leaving by Saturday's 9 a.m. checkout time involved physical pain; I would not see this place or any like it for another year.

Now, here we are. The dynamic of course is all different. We're no longer tourists -- I go to work daily (in a home office). There are mundane chores to do. Dental and haircut appointments to make. Trash to put out. Car maintenance. Yard work (only the minimum -- we planned a "freedom landscape"). Decks to stain. All the usual things it takes to run a life.

And the sense of urgency is gone. I no longer feel compelled to wring every minute of enjoyment from living lakeside. If I skip an evening's fishing, there's always tomorrow. We'll see how this experiment in Northwoods living goes. I loved the Manitowoc/Two Rivers area, from where we came, and life along Lake Michigan. I know I'll miss the friends I left behind. The fact is, though, I've always wanted to try living at this latitude, and so has Noelle.

So here we are. Will it be everything we dreamed of? Or will we come to take it all for granted -- familiarity breeding indifference? Time will tell. One day, week and month at a time.

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?