Life On the Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

My neighbor's ornamental cherry tree, beneath an autumnal
 mackerel sky

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The rainbow trout are skinny now, and dark, because they are fall spawners. The water temperature was 64 degrees F. yesterday, following a day of good nymph fishing at dark. Four hooked, three landed, all in ten minutes. The biggest? Sixteen inches, and fought like a young steelhead. The others about eleven and twelve. The feeding period lasts about ten minutes. and, as the year wears on, it will become shorter yet. Then is mindful of my years of great nymph fishing at dusk in Seattle's Green Lake, right in the heart of the city.

The next two nightfalls, though, skunks. Though following a warm day, there were no bug hatches in early evening to entice the trout to feed. I cast into the gathering gloom with only the bats to keep me company. I've long gotten over my fear of one of them flying into my face. But some times they come alarmingly close.

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I could live without Beethoven, but not without Bach.

Ripening, but not quite ready to pick

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T'is Fall, no doubt about it. Water temperature, 68 degrees F. And I put out my first bait in early afternoon and in ten minutes had an eleven-inch rainbow trout.

A little the worse for wear and the long, warm season, he had  fall coloration, which reminded me that these are  hatchery-raised trout from Eastern Washington and are fall spawners. Only there is no place here for them to spawn.

Trout need an inlet with high dissolved oxygen content in which to lay their eggs. We have no such thing, alas. Our inlet is runoff from a dairy farm and is warm and full of phosphorous and nitrogen that acts as a fixative. So we are doomed to hatchery reared trout. But the good news is, they grow pretty fast in a summer lowland lake, especially one that is highly eutrophic, like ours is.

So we expect a reasonable number of one- and two-pound trout, and are generally not disappointed.

Would they'd take flies year round, but, no, it is generally only in the spring, for a fixed and short season. The bluegills and, when we had them, the black crappies are superb fly fish throughout the summer season. A man from the state wildlife department tells me that we lost the black crappie because we started treating the lake for weeds, and all spinyray fish (but especially the crappies) need lots of weed in which to spawn and mature.

Now if somebody could figure out a way to bring back the crappies, aside from not treating the weeds with chemicals (which the people of the lake would  not agree to), our lake would be an ideal place to live.

Female belted kingfisher as brown bands on her body beneath her wings

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With a thud, the kingfisher hits the double-paned front window facing the lake and lies stunned on the deck. Norma buzzes me excitedly on the intercom and I run up the basement staircase, thinking she has fallen or there has been some small accident, but, no, it is the resident kingfisher, lying stunned flat on the deck.

Sure, an occasional dumb rufus-sided towhee has mistaken two adjacent windows for a thoroughfare and tried to negotiate it, and crashes to the boards, dead as a stone, but not ever so wise and fleet-of-wing a bird as the belted kingfisher, lord of the skies and skydiver into watery depths for his fish dinner.

I go out onto the deck with a plastic bag in hand into which to gather the blue and gray corpse, and lug it to the garbage can (fate and depository of so many small dead birds), but as I approach the kingfisher raises his head and regards me with his intense black beady eye. It is wild, fierce, and freezes me in my track.

Injured but not dead, I decide, and for a very short moment we stare into each other's faces. Then--magnificent even in this stunned state of grace--he rights himself by a degree or two and lifts, lifts, into flight, and flashes off over the lake.

And away.

How glad I am.
 

Thanks for the visit,
Robert C. Arnold, Editor