MISQUAH — Three weeks into the season, the walleye fishing on the Chain of Lakes remains good, and the accounts of it remain, as they tend to this time of year, considerably better than good.

At the cleaning station behind Tim’s Bait & Liquor, where the week’s catch is filleted and the week’s claims are entered into the record, the average reported walleye now measures, by this correspondent’s own tape, twenty-six inches. That figure climbs roughly a quarter inch with each retelling and a full inch in the presence of anyone from out of town.

The fishing itself has been steady. Big Pelican is giving up walleye off the main gravel bar in fourteen to eighteen feet of water — leeches for the patient, nightcrawlers for the rest of us. Whitefish has been slower but has produced the bigger fish. Northern pike are thick along the weedlines on every lake on the Chain, and a few crappie are coming off the brush in Sandy Lake right at last light.

The week’s unofficial big fish was claimed by Vern Dahlquist, who described his walleye as “a hair under a wall-hanger.” The claim was amended, from the adjacent stool, by his wife Eunice, who put the fish at “a hair under fifteen inches, and that’s measuring generous, with the tail spread.” Mr. Dahlquist did not so much dispute the correction as look out the window at the lake for a time.

For those new to the Chain: the limit is six walleye, only one of which may top twenty inches — a restriction no one at the cleaning station has lately been troubled by. Live bait is outfishing artificials. And the best spot, as ever, is the one nobody will tell you about, the second-best being wherever Vern is not.

The DNR reminds anglers that the public landing is open for the season and that watercraft inspections are in effect. Tim’s opens daily at 5:30 a.m., and earlier, Brevik notes, if you knock and he’s up.