Bluegill -- even little bluegill like this fish hooked Friday evening -- have a subtle beauty.
MILLERSYLVANIA STATE PARK -- The sun beat down on the Subaru Friday afternoon, and it felt a lot hotter than the 74-degree readout on the dashboard.
It felt like summer. It felt like humid, warm, panfish weather.
I was done with work for the week, and I was hungry to get away from all complicated things. I just wanted to cast and feel the wiggle of a few fish.
The tides didn't look great for sea-run cutthroat trout in Puget Sound, most parts of western Washington rivers are closed until June 1, and I wasn't up to elbowing my way onto local lakes warming up for the weekend.
I needed something out of the way of other anglers, jet skis and any kind of ruckus. I needed bluegill, crappie, pumpkinseed sunfish -- the aggressive, snappy fish of summer evenings since I was a kid.
Then I thought of a shallow, weedy bay at Deep Lake -- which is actually a small, not-so-deep lake at Millersylvania State Park. I knew other anglers would probably fish the main part of the lake for stocker rainbows and some pretty big pre-spawn bass.
I also suspected that the hot sun would warm up that shallow, weedy bay -- and rev up the panfish. Shallow bays -- especially ones with dark bottoms and a lot of weeds, get bass and panfish cranked up long before the rest of the cold lake turns on. I got out of Olympia before rush hour hit -- and was walking toward that bay 20 minutes after leaving work.
Midges were hatching, and swirly rises dotted the bay. I could tell that the fish rising in deeper water were stocker rainbow trout -- with maybe some bigger holdovers from last year.
The smaller, bubblier rises nearer shore were bluegill, pumpkinseed sunfish, crappie and a few yellow perch. I got out my panfish fly box -- which is a collection of tattered, used trout nymphs, dry flies -- and a few tiny Woolly Buggers and Clouser Minnows I tie especially for crappie.
The water smelled like wet dirt and growing weeds -- fertile and full of life. I tied on a size 14 Copper John nymph -- it lost its tail on Oregon's Deschutes River sometime last year, but panfish don't care -- and cast it toward a sunken tree that poked out of the water near a weedbed.
I imagined that bright fly -- early season panfish love shiny, metallic flies here in western Washington -- slowly sinking toward a mixed school of bluegill, pumpkinseeds and crappie. The line suddenly tightened all by itself, and a nice bluegill planed off on to the side.
Playing a nice bluegill is like trying to reel in a Frisbee -- they slide through the water from one side to another.
A minute later, the bluegill was in the shoreline stew of duckweed, last year's broken, rotting reeds and emerging green plants. The fish glowed in the soft light, and I felt a connection to the scabby-kneed, bluegill hunter I was as a fifth grader in 1971.
The weekend -- one that started like a summer weekend -- was off to a great start.
