Hex Hatch, or An Exercise in Frustration

Those who ply the trout waters of the Midwest are aware of the mayfly Hexagenia limbata, or "Hex" for short. It's the largest mayfly known, and when it hatches, it draws the largest trout in the stream out of hiding. Clouds of them have been known to show up on Doppler radar on Lake Erie and along the upper Mississippi.

It goes about 2 1/2-3 inches long with the tails (that's 6-8 cm for those of you living in advanced cultures), ranges from a dusty brown, to buttery yellow, to an off-white tan. Hatches usually start in my home state in early June in the South-West and progress North and East over the next six weeks or so. The bugs generally start to come off of the water at dusk shortly after the whippoorwills start singing and continue to come off until after midnight. This generally means that in order to fish the hatch, you have to fish in the dark. Doing so can be very challenging even on a stream you know well. It is downright dangerous and stupid on a stream you don't, and don't even think about going if the water is high.

So what do I see on the screen of my cottage this past Friday morning?

For those of you who don't know mayflies, the grayish object at the bottom is the husk of the mayfly's original adult form, the dun. It has molted into a spinner, the form in which it will mate, lay its eggs (if it's a female), and die.

Normally, this would excite me no end: there's a passably good trout stream a few miles away, which I think would play host to these bugs. And I know the stream pretty well.

Problem is, it's been raining like hell for 2 weeks, and the streams are all over their banks, and not likely to come down soon.

(grinds teeth) Bloody weather.

Back Again

I've been spending most of my time at the cottage I mentioned a few posts ago, and I can't post from there, so the world has had a respite from my nonsense. While I was loafing around fishing and working on my golf game, the Midwest flooded, the corn crop has been trashed, Tim Russert has died, and the Supreme Court has evidenced some modicum of sanity and bitch-slapped the Bush administration on Habeas Corpus at Gitmo.

Boo, boo^2, boo-hoo, and YAY!

The cottage was great, aside from the 10 days of periodic deluge. Thankfully, I'm on a hill on a lake and the house is built over a crawl-space, so it didn't flood.

A couple of pics of the place:


That's the actual cottage. Not much to look at, but considering I'm only paying as couple of hundred bucks a month (with 18 holes of golf a day), I'm not going to complain about a little peeling paint or an uneven floor. This is the view toward the lake:

The lawn was a bit shaggy that day, because the days and days of rain made it impossible to get a mower out there and cut the grass. And this is the view on the other side of the house:


The club house and first tee of the golf course.

Life ain't half bad.

Opening Day - Mostly Harmless

The fishing opener over the weekend was fun, but not terribly successful. One legal trout boated (by my friend Jim, not me: I got skunked on trout) between three guys, and one lost at the side of the boat. Conditions were not on our side: the wind was ferocious: dragging the boat across the lake, even when we had both anchors down. The pan fish were nowhere to be found. Mostly, we caught undersized largemouth.


Ah, well: next time.

Tight Lines!

FINALLY! Fishing season is here again. I thought winter was never going to let go. While it wasn't particularly cold this year, we had more snow than we've ever had in one year as long as I've been around. The ice just went out on area lakes two weeks ago.

The Milwaukee River is still too high to fish, but the Menomonee is down and the steelhead are running. Had no luck yesterday, but I'm gonna try to get into one today before the rain gets here.