116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
There can be good in a bad drought
Wild Side column: Wading for fish and growing loads of tomatoes have been a benefit
While I would never wish for a drought or revel in one, they have their compensations for people (like me) who enjoy raising tomatoes and wading in rivers.
Blight, the greatest impediment to a good tomato crop, flourishes during wet, fungus-friendly summers. Blight has been in remission during the drought of 2023, and with almost daily strategic watering, my 71 6-foot-tall tomato plants are yielding hundreds of beer flats of perfect fruit.
I can’t fix “too wet,” but I can fix “too dry.”
Unlike in wet years, when runoff from heavy rains elevates Iowa’s interior rivers to levels hostile to wading anglers, those rivers, with a few short-lived blips, have been comfortably fishable ever since the ice went out in March.
As I write this on Wednesday, the low and slow Wapsipinicon at the Independence gauge registered a height of 4.41 feet and a discharge of 33 cubic feet per second — a flow just 9.4 percent of the annual average of 352 cfs, a flow quite reminiscent of the droughts of 1988 and 2012, two of my most productive and memorable years of gardening and fishing in Iowa’s interior rivers.
How low and slow is that?
So low that I can wade all but the increasingly few holes where the game fish have been forced to concentrate — areas into which my lures go but my feet do not.
So slow that the river more closely resembles a linear pond than a flowing stream. So slow that lures, without current interference, can be presented with extreme precision.
So slow that when I tripped over an unseen rock a week ago and took a header into waist-deep water, my hat had traveled just a few feet downstream before I had recovered enough to retrieve it. (Incidentally, Apple’s claim that its iPhone 11 is “water resistant” has again been verified.)
The ongoing drought, which technically began on July 8, 2020, is in its 164th consecutive week of at least D1 (excessively dry) conditions somewhere in Iowa, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
While it already has lasted longer than the droughts of 1988 and 2012, those droughts “were more intense, as they were coupled with anomalously warm temperatures and far greater coverage of D3-D4 (extreme and exceptional drought),” said State Climatologist Justin Glisan.
Glisan said the drought of 1988 registered the fourth hottest and 14th driest summer on record, and the drought of 2012 was just the reverse: the fifth driest and 14th hottest.
Noting heat makes droughts drier and dry ground makes them hotter, Glisan described this summer as a “cool drought.” July of 2012, he said, was the fourth-warmest July on record, while last month, by contrast, was actually cooler than normal.
The comparatively cool summer of 2023 mitigated some of the damage that might otherwise have been done in a year that included the 16th driest spring (March, April and May) and the 18th driest June.
It also elevated the pleasure quotient of morning fishing and evening watering.
Daily Newsletters