MISQUAH — Big Pelican read 58 Monday morning, down four on the week and down twelve since the fair, and that is the number I have been waiting on since August. The fall bite is here. It will be here for six weeks and it is the best fishing this chain produces in a year.

Walleye on the eight-to-fourteen-foot breaks, moving shallower as the water keeps dropping, and they are eating in the middle of the day now as well as at the ends of it, which is the thing that changes in late September and the thing most people miss because they have stopped going.

A jig and a fathead. That is the whole program. I have nothing more complicated to tell you and I am not going to invent something.

Panfish are as good as they get, northerns are in the shallow cabbage and are hostile, and the smallmouth are feeding hard ahead of the cold.

The landing lot held nine trailers Saturday, which is the most since Labor Day and still leaves room for twenty more. Six of the nine were from out of the county.

The ramp lip on the right-hand side, about eight feet down, is still there. Back down the left. The county still knows. This is the fourth week I have printed this and I have begun to enjoy it.

Turnover is coming. On this chain it usually starts in the second week of October and it makes the fishing strange for about ten days — fish scattered, bites that do not repeat. Do not read anything into a bad trip in the middle of next month. Everybody has one.