Submitted photo The author’s brother Ben Simonson casts alongside a dock complex for schooling crappies amidst the wakes of pleasure cruisers out from shore.

The churn of a recreational lake doubles when the wind blows from your side on the hottest days of summer. The roll of waves from wake boats, pontoons and jet skis is nonstop as the temperature climbs into the 80s and lower 90s, and people seek the calm side of the water to cruise, see and be seen while cooling off on the water. From tubers and skiers to leisurely floaters and even some hardy fishermen in between all the recreational craft, this weekend’s warm conditions brought the rolling water to our side of the lake — not from the wind which was blowing off shore, but from all of the wakes. 


While the activity is constant, and you’d think fishing would be a good deal slower with all the buzz starting just a few yards out from the docks, something amazing happens in the shallows beneath the high summer sun from time to time when conditions are right. Having experienced it a few times before, in similar stretches of warming water and rolling crests and troughs, I rose up from my beach lounger and grabbed my go-to fly rod with the Type III sinking line and a chartreuse Clouser minnow on it and waded out into the opening between our dock and the neighbor’s set up with red canopied fishing and speed boats on either side of it. Pumping a few false casts while peeling line off the reel, I dropped the rod tip and zipped my cast out just beyond the farthest silver corner post of the boat lift and let the fly sink. 


Lifting my rod tip, I felt the dead weight and thought from its sluggish back and forth fight that it could be a crappie, perhaps the first of the year in our area of the normally clear water now tinted a dingy brown color by the day’s recreational waves. Coming to the surface, the hand-sized fish was indeed a black crappie, and suddenly I was on the job. Slipping the speck back into the shallows, I wound up and delivered a second cast, and sure enough, a bigger calico came to hand, measuring around ten inches. I’d muster a few more of what would have been keeper sized fish on any day for our lake, but in the joy of the warm and wavy summer afternoon, I released the crappies I caught and passed the fly rod on to my brother, so he could work on his developing cast with the nice reward of some respectable black crappies, and the often available bluegills that were schooling with them in the rolling shallows.


While jumping off our dock with my kids and my niece, he brought in several nice specks and in total we landed more than 50 fish in the hour long stretch of recreational angling amidst the parade of boats. It was amazing not only in the sense that the Clouser minnow we used survived such abuse and a couple errant casts, but also because the waves didn’t cease until early evening. The bite likely would have gone on that long as well, if the hot sun overhead hadn’t sent us scrambling for more SPF 50. 


In the end, the knee-deep outing just a few feet from our collection of lounge chairs and inflatable floaties was a welcome surprise, with a set of summer fish brought in by what many times I see as a challenge on the recreational mid-day waters of our lake. With that in mind, the fast activity for a favorite species served as a reminder that any time is a good time to be fishing … in our outdoors.