MISQUAH — The water hit seventy-two degrees this week, and the fish have responded by getting sensible, which means you should too: go early. Walleye are holding off the main-lake points in eighteen to twenty-two feet and they bite honest from first light to about nine, after which they sulk, and so will you, and so will everyone in the boat. A jig and a minnow, slow, worked just off the bottom, is doing the job. After breakfast, reel up, go home, and start the potato salad, because Saturday is coming and the potato salad does not make itself.

The rest of the report, by species: the panfish are thick in the shallows off Sandy, which is the best fishing there is for a kid with an afternoon and a bobber, and there will be kids; the crappies are still stacked on the brush cribs the Sportsmen’s Club sank years ago and will go to their graves before disclosing; the pike are working the cabbage off the same Sandy Lake flats, aggressive and not particular; and the muskie are active, as you have heard, in considerable detail, from everyone. I drove out to Whitefish myself and looked at the Knutson boy’s photographs. Yes, it’s real. Yes, he’s four. No, you cannot have his spot, and no, I don’t know it, and if I did I wouldn’t say (see Outdoors).

Now the part I say every year and mean more this year. Saturday the Chain will hold more boats than I have seen on it since the centennial — the boat parade at noon, and then everybody else, all afternoon, all weekend. If you are in the parade, you are not fishing; make your peace with that now and enjoy the parade. If you are fishing, give the parade a wide berth and give the north end of Big Pelican a wider, slower one. The two loon chicks up there still cannot dive away from a swell, and the fireworks will rattle them enough after dark without your wake doing it in daylight.

Tim’s Bait & Liquor will be open early Saturday — leeches, crawlers, ice, and the last of the good sparklers — and closed by parade time, because I, too, intend to stand on the landing and watch twenty-six boats go in a circle, which is the kind of thing a person moves to a town like this to see. Fish early, wave often, slow down for the chicks, and I’ll see you on the water, and then on the shore.