MISQUAH — The walleye have gone a little sullen at midday on the Chain, as they tend to once the water climbs past sixty-five, but the evening bite on Big Pelican remains, in the considered judgment of the cleaning station behind Tim’s, “honest” — a word that on this lake carries the weight of testimony.

Best results have come in the last hour of light, off the deeper edges of the gravel bar in eighteen to twenty-two feet, on a leech and a slow drift; the better fish, as ever, come right at dark, which now falls near nine-thirty, so plan supper accordingly. The midday crowd has mostly given up and gone for panfish, which is no insult: the bluegills are on the beds in two feet of water off Sandy and Bass and will keep a child, or an adult who admits it, busy and grinning all afternoon.

The northern pike, meanwhile, have gotten aggressive in the cabbage on Sandy Lake — hammer-handles mostly, but the occasional fish “worth the steel leader,” as one regular put it, and worth the snipped line of the angler who forgot one. Vern Dahlquist reported a pike he called “a good one,” a characterization his wife Eunice, present at the next stool, allowed to stand without amendment — a development regular readers will recognize as significant, Eunice being the recognized authority on the gap between Vern’s fish and the record of them.

The almanac, for those keeping one: surface temperature stood at sixty-eight on Big Pelican Thursday evening and seventy-one on Sandy, the water rides about two inches above its June average, and the mayflies staged one modest hatch midweek that made every angler on the gravel bar feel personally insulted. Harold Aas, holding down the cleaning-station bench in a supervisory capacity, pronounced the summer “on schedule, more or less,” and noted that somebody — he would not say who — has been seen twice this week idling over the deep rocks on Whitefish where the big muskies live, “which means either he’s onto something or he’s about to donate a lure.”

A reminder, with the loon chicks now on the water (see Outdoors): the no-wake zones near the nesting areas on Big Pelican are in effect, and the loons, Tim Brevik notes, “were here first, and have the chicks to prove it, and aren’t asking for much.” The store opens at 5:30 a.m. — earlier, Brevik adds, “if you knock and I’m up, which I generally am” — and the leeches, he reports, “are lively this week, which is more than I can say for the walleye at noon, or for some of the company.”