Glow sticks with wings

When I was a kid, I remember one of them sitting on the very tip of my fishing rod as I sat out in a boat on the Michigan Upper Peninsula’s Duck Lake, where my family used to vacation. An inch and a half long, its toothpick-thin sunlit body a bright, almost luminous blue, wings nearly invisible, it hung there motionless unless I moved the rod tip, whereupon it lifted off, hovered a moment, and alit again the instant the rod went still.

I thought this was a little dragonfly. I wasn’t far off – it was a damselfly, a member of the same order of insects (Odonata). Damsel is an apt label – these creatures look and act feminine when compared to their bigger and more boisterous cousins. At rest, they hold their four clear membrane wings not out to the sides but folded over the back, tilted upward, front to back. In flight, they don’t rattle like dragonflies; they are silent, the wings gently flickering as they glide over the water.

Many damselflies are brightly colored, more so than dragonflies, in green, red, blue, yellow. Like dragonflies, these are water creatures, spending most of their lifecycle submerged in a nymph stage. Their mode of feeding gives the lie to their feminine bearing: They are fierce predators. As they fly, they use hairs on their hind legs to snare smaller insects, then chew them up.

You surely have damsels these damsels on your lake. Watch for them around reed beds and anywhere green plants emerge from the water. If you’re lucky, one or two of them may pay a visit while you’re out in the boat fishing. They provide a nice diversion while you patiently wait for a bobber to go down.

Eagle efficiency

I see eagles here on Birch Lake, not all the time but often enough to know we have a resident pair. There is one kind of occasion on which I'm almost guaranteed a close look.

When fishing, I try not to damage what I catch. When a bobber goes down I strike quickly, ignoring the advice my father gave when I was a kid -- to "let him take it for a while." That might have been appropriate back when we kept and ate most of what we caught, but it's a poor practice if catching and releasing, as it means fish get hooked deep in the throat.

By setting the hook right away, you mostly lip-hook the fish and can release them without harm. If by chance a fish manages to swallow the hook, the best course is to leave the hook in place and cut the line. The fish swims off and in time the hook works loose. But then there are the borderline cases, when it looks as if I could slip the hook out with my needlenose pliers, but I overestimate my surgical skills, and I injure a fish.

My favorite spot is a rock bar about 100 yards out from an undeveloped (because wet) stretch of shoreline, backed by heavy woods that include white pines where eagles perch. Suppose I unhook, and injure, an undersize walleye. Before long the fish will flounder on the surface, not far from the boat. Then it's just a matter of waiting, and not very long. It always seems to happen when I am looking in the opposite direction.

Suddenly behind and from above me there's a whish, whish, whish, whish...I turn just in time to see an eagle deftly dip its bright-yellow talons into the water, fly off with the fish, and carry it up and away into the trees. It happened just the other evening, the eagle touching the water no more than 20 feet to the shoreward side of the boat.

The efficiency is quite amazing -- it's almost as if the eagles watch me from a treetop in expectation. I hope their attention is not a comment on my poor catch-and-release hygiene. Their swoop-and-snatch is beautiful to see but is no excuse for letting oneself be a slob fisherman.

Four days in July

What was it like on your lake over the Fourth of July? I wouldn't want to live on Birch Lake if it were always as busy as in the past four days. Fortunately, it isn't; not by far.

This is a quiet lake -- big enough, I like to say, to have nice fish, but small enough to keep the big boats off. The last half of that falls apart over the summer holidays weekends, especially the Fourth. This 180-acre lake near Harshaw, Wis., has mostly small summer cottages. Over the Fourth, almost all of them are occupied. On one hand that creates a festive atmosphere, conversation and laughter carrying over the water, campfire smoke scenting the air. On the other, it means boat traffic and the inevtiable conflicts between the boaters and those who favor quieter pursuits.

There's an easy remedy for such conflicts, of course, and maybe your lake has employed it. On Birch, we haven't. And so on these long weekends, we get boat noise and boat wake from mid-morning clear up to and after sunset. The time of day most appealing for fishing also appeals to water skiers, tubers, Jet Ski owners, and those who simple like to drive as fast as possible around the lake's perimeter.

Now, I can imagine I occupy some moral high ground because I like quiet activities, chiefly anchoring the boat over a favorite rock bar and slip-bobbering for walleyes and smallmouth bass. The truth is, though, I water-skied as a kid and enjoyed it; I also have a grandson, 18 months old now, who one day might like being towed behind a boat on an inflated tube. It's also true that I own a fishing boat with a 25 hp outboard and do not navigate silently to fishing spots. Do I have the right to say a motorboat is all right, so long as it's no bigger than mine? .

On the flip side, large boats have an outsized impact on the lake. Yesterday at dusk while I and others were fishing, at least one boat sounded like a stock car revving its engine for time trials at the track. Two or three other boats like it were tearing around, kicking up wakes that rocked the fishing boats constantly. The evening sounded like an engine and smelled faintly of gasoline. My cousin Tom observes that big boats and Jet Skis are like nuclear weapons -- it takes just one to dominate the atmosphere of a whole lake, at any rate a lake the size of Birch.

So, what's the remedy? Hours. Many lake associations have them. Between, say, 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., anything goes on the water. Outside those hours, it's no-wake speeds, or skiing and "personal watercraft" are prohibited, or some restrictions are set so that anglers, canoers and kayakers can have their moments. It's an ideal compromise. In bright midday sunlight, the fishing is generally poor anyway. It also tends to be windy, making things difficult for paddlers. Boat traffic then isn't really bothersome. Meanwhile, the mellow, quiet hours are protected.

It's a solution I'd like to see the Friends of Birch Lake try -- even if just on an advisory basis, or an honor system if you will. Of course, this being Sunday, the last gasp of a four-day holiday, the weekenders will go home, and once again the lake will be quiet -- even, for the most part, during the heat of the day. That's why we like this lake. That's why we live here.

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.