Interlude with bugs improves the fishing

The ebony jewelwing, a name almost as pretty as the bug itself, provided an enchanting interlude Wednesday evening during an otherwise difficult and at times discouraging fishing outing.

With the Wapsipinicon registering 5.7 feet on the Independence gauge, I had been relearning my annual lesson that I cannot successfully fish the river until it falls to 5.25 feet. I could not wade within casting distance of my intended rocky bank targets, and with more of my body exposed to the too-swift current, the river was pushing me around like an unwelcome visitor.

While I strolled the bank, steeling myself for the arduous, upstream, half-mile wade back to my point of departure, I found myself surrounded by a swirl of brilliant flittering bugs of the kind we used to call snake feeders when we were kids.

Not that I am all that interested in bugs. Most of the bugs of my acquaintance -- gnats, flies, wasps, hornets, bees and mosquitoes -- tend to annoy me. But I was even less interested in wading against the current in the 93-degree heat.

Since I am easily distracted by pretty, shiny things, I quickly became absorbed in trying to photograph the bugs, which I later identified as ebony jewelwings, a midsummer damselfly found near moving water in all 99 Iowa counties.

I was fascinated by their black diaphanous wings and their metallic bodies, which depending upon how the light struck them, appeared either green or blue.

They did not seem all that scared of me as I stalked them with my camera. But time after time, just as I was about to click the shutter, they would lift off for a nearby plant. Finally, after standing stock-still and waiting for them to come to me, I got a couple of decent pictures.

The interlude improved my outlook enough to try another stretch of the river -- a sandbar dropping into deeper water near a riprapped bank -- where I thought I could at least get my lure within range of a fish.

Nothing much happened until a cloud bank extinguished the blazing sun and thunder started rumbling upriver.

Then a 16-inch smallmouth broke the drought and refreshed me more than a drink of cold water.

In the next 10 minutes as the storm front drew ever closer, I caught five more nice smallmouth and called "last cast" so many times that even I stopped believing myself.

I stayed until the first big raindrops splatted against the lenses of my glasses and drove away from the river with jagged orange lightning bolts discharging themselves into a spring-green cornfield on the horizon.