MISQUAH — Fifty boats are expected on Loon Lake at first light Saturday for the annual bass tournament, the biggest single day of competitive fishing on the Chain, and the one day a year the public landing looks like a place where something is happening.

The format is unchanged, which is to say the format is argued about every year and changed never. Boats blast off at legal light, fish until early afternoon, and bring their best five bass to the weigh-in at the landing at three o’clock. Heaviest bag takes it. Fish are weighed, measured, and released alive, the tournament having long since made its peace with catch-and-release, over the objection of exactly one man who is asked to sit near the front so he can be watched.

The perennial dispute concerns species. Loon Lake gives up both largemouth, which sulk in the lily pads on the north end, and smallmouth, which hold on the rocky drop-offs on the south, and every year someone argues that a pound of scrappy smallmouth is worth more than a pound of lazy largemouth, and every year the committee rules that a pound is a pound, and every year the argument is filed again for next year. It is less a rule dispute than a summer tradition wearing a rule’s clothing.

Last year’s winning bag went a little over eighteen pounds and was brought in by a boat that declined, graciously, to say where. This is standard. Tournament anglers will tell you the weather, the water temperature, and the phase of the moon, and will die before they tell you the spot.

Harold Aas, 81, will be at his customary post on the bench by the cleaning station, where he has watched this tournament for more years than most of the entrants have been alive, and where he offers, to anyone who slows down, a running commentary that is roughly half accurate and entirely worth hearing. Tim’s Bait & Liquor reports it is stocked and braced. The weigh-in is at three; the public is welcome, and the bass, we are assured, are ready to be uncooperative.