In the bright sunshine of midday, I couldn’t resist the flip of a long-tailed slumpbuster streamer off the dock in between raking the beach and my next set of cabin chores. The size six fly was a beefy offering for the schooling bluegills and was sure to keep the smaller panfish off while enticing a strike from the bigger bulls of nine inches at the top end of the spectrum I had been connecting with in the clear shallows. Stripping the green sinking line off the reel almost down to the backing, I wound up a cast that dropped the fly just below the red canopy of the neighbor’s boat, tightened up the slack and gave the tether a quick tug to set the squirrel tail at the end of the streamer in motion.

The resulting take was an uncharacteristically subtle one as I raised the rod and pulled down on the line, setting the hook on the fish 40 feet away. The run was also unlike a bluegill as it stayed deep and gave only slight side-to-side shakes which kept the rod in a solid arch as I retrieved the line and brought the fish closer. I’m sure my mouth went as agape as that of the fish which came to the surface, as the white paper jaws of a big black crappie with my fly pinned in them approached the dock. Bending down, I lifted it up and gave it a quick hand measurement. The crappie was at least 11 inches, maybe 12, which for our water was huge.

I unhooked the speck and set it back into the lake, and watched it swim diagonally back to the break line on the edge of the boat lift which I had just cast to and figured from all my previous lessons on the water, if there was one crappie in a spot there certainly had to be more. Tossing another cast out to the edge of the shallows, my suspicions were confirmed as the same take on the slow drop of the fly came to be and with a hookset and an easy retrieve a slightly smaller crappie came to hand.

I called back to my boys who were playing on the beach and told them to grab their rods, already rigged with small crappie jigs. They came jogging out to the dock, ready for fast fishing and they got it under the warm July sun. Furiously, we began flipping our offerings at an angle toward the end of the neighbor’s complex of boat lifts. For 20 minutes we hoisted crappies of various sizes, with the occasional large green sunfish mixed in. The biggest black crappie went a legitimate 12 inches, and the average ran around nine or10. In all my years casting from the end of the dock at the lake cabin — where my summers had been hallmarked by bluegills and smaller perch — I had never seen such a school, let alone in the bright conditions of midday. We landed a couple dozen before they disappeared, or perhaps had enough of our harassment, and the bite was left to just the bluegills once again.

The instance, however, triggered day after day of casting for my kids, and soon they were targeting the bass which lurked beneath our own boats, and trying to catch one bluegill in every size. The jingle of spoons on leaders followed by a distant splash resulted in exciting pike strikes, and challenging battles back to the gray metal platforms they stood on, and suddenly I was taken back to when my own offerings of red-and-white or five of diamonds did the same adding a jolt of adrenaline to my youthful summer days. It was another full circle moment, started by a most unusual school for our stretch of the shoreline but one that was more than welcome at a very familiar spot … in our outdoors.