MISQUAH — The first thing the wind did Wednesday was give the lake back its far shores, and the first thing the far shores did was make everyone’s casting look shorter. A week of fishing inside a white room does things to the eye. Several boats reported the return of visibility as “losing an excuse,” and I pass that along in the spirit of full disclosure in which it was offered to me at the cleaning station.

The fishing itself has begun its August turn. The walleye are sliding out to the deeper program — sixteen to twenty-two feet on the main-lake structure, leeches still honest, crawlers closing fast — and the dusk bite, which spent smoke week performing on Mars, has returned to Earth and settled into the reliable last hour before dark. The copper light is gone; the fish, it turns out, never needed it. Panfish remain the summer’s most generous department, weedline bluegills in particular, and the smallmouth have entered their late-summer sulk, which is not personal.

Now, the item several of you have already heard secondhand: on Tuesday evening, in the new clarity, something rose near the north end of Bass Lake that was witnessed by two boats and described, under separate questioning, as “a very large fish” and “a modest log with opinions.” Readers with long memories will recall a suspicious splash in the same general water earlier this summer. The file remains open. I will say only that Whitefish’s muskie record has stood at 53 inches since 1998, that a four-year-old came within two inches of it in June, and that Bass Lake has never held the record and would, in my professional judgment, enjoy the attention.

Water temps eased to 72 with the clean nights. The weekend looks fair, light chop, the kind of ordinary a person could get used to. The week’s weather is reviewed below, where it will receive, for the first time in a while, an unfiltered verdict.