MISQUAH — The fishing on the Chain has settled into its honest midsummer pattern now that the Fourth has passed, the cleaning station behind Tim’s reports — the walleye holding deep and biting early, the panfish thick in the shallows, and the lake, for a blessed week or two, emptier of the holiday crowd.

The walleye have gone to the deep edges as the surface warms, and are taking leeches off the gravel bars in eighteen to twenty-four feet of water in the first and last hours of light. “You want to be out there before the lake wakes up,” Tim Brevik advised. “By ten in the morning they’re sulking, and so am I.” The midday hours, he noted, belong to the panfish, which are obliging the bobber crowd from every dock and weed bed on the Chain.

It is, Brevik said, a fine stretch for the young anglers — the bluegills cooperative, the weather warm, the stakes agreeably low. “This is the fishing you remember being a kid,” he said. “Sunfish off the end of the dock, one after another, nobody keeping score. Let the kids have the dock this month. The walleye will keep.” The northern pike, he added, remain active in the cabbage for anyone wanting a fight, “and a steel leader, which, as it happens, I sell.”

The almanac: surface water hit seventy-two on Big Pelican over the holiday and seventy-four on Sandy, the lake sits an inch under its June mark, and first light now comes at 5:34, which Brevik mentions “so nobody can claim they weren’t warned.” On Whitefish, the deep rocks are drawing their annual midsummer pilgrimage of muskie hopefuls — traffic that has roughly doubled, by the store’s unscientific count, since a four-year-old made the front page. The bass tournament comes to the Chain on Saturday, July 18, out of the Loon Lake landing: fifty boats expected, weigh-in at three, spectators welcome and mostly dry.

The store opens at 5:30 a.m. — “earlier if you knock and I’m up, which since the Fourth I generally am, the fireworks having rung in my ears clear through Tuesday.” Leeches are lively, crawlers are “good, considering,” and the minnow tank, Brevik confirmed, is running quiet and clear at last, the new one having finally “made its peace with the place.”