116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
A year of drought and good fishing
Wild Side column: Looking back on a 2023 that had some good and bad
For the first time in 40 years I wished my 2023 garden were smaller.
That’s because, in a year of scarce rainfall, I had to hand water my 1/3-acre patch nearly every day throughout the growing season.
I’d done that before, in the droughts of 1988 and 2012, at age 40 and 64, respectively, but this time it took longer and hurt more.
Still the garden yielded bountiful state-fair-quality produce while affording its caretaker beneficial exercise, zen-like tranquility and the illusion of being his own boss.
How dry was 2023?
State Climatologist Justin Glisan said the statewide average rainfall, 27 inches, fell 8.5 inches below normal, placing it among the 25 driest years in the past 151 years. In Eastern Iowa, the driest part of the state, the annual deficit ranged from 15 to 18 inches, Glisan said.
The drought of ’23, he said, is actually the third year of a three-year drought (and counting). Its cumulative effect has reduced stream flows to record low levels across many river basins and imperiled drinking water supplies in some communities.
It also changed my morning ritual, eliminating the need to check my phone for the Wapsipinicon River level or the weather forecast. Both remained static throughout the year: 4.5 feet on the Independence gauge, 0 rainfall expected in the next 10 days.
Foretelling the year to come, neither rain nor snow in February and March hindered my first season of maple sap collection, which yielded gallons of syrup for my partner Dean Kress of Quasqueton and me.
Back when we had morel mushroom seasons in Iowa, the right combination of soil warmth and moisture would occur repeatedly between April 15 and May 15. Since the advent of the state’s second-longest drought (now at 183 weeks), we are lucky to have a mushroom day.
For my friend Arthur Clark and me, that day occurred May 13, when after a rare spring shower we filled our bags with enough fresh morels to make several meals.
On the plus side of the drought, my lawn quit growing right after its dandelion phase and before its white clover phase, and all the time I would normally spend mowing was available for other endeavors.
Like fishing, which was good on the Wapsipinicon from ice out in March through ice in after Thanksgiving.
The nicest thing about a drought is that silt quits running off farm fields. Even a 300-mile-long river like the Wapsi, which drains more than 1 million acres of farmland, will, after months of drought, flow as clear and clean as a trout stream — reason enough to go fishing at every opportunity. Who gets to catch bass, walleye and northern out of a trout stream?
With the river at easily wadable levels throughout the open water season, I could go fishing every day if I wanted to. And knowing that such conditions were the exception rather than the rule and that sight-feeding gamefish could see my lures distinctly in the aquarium-clear water, I wanted to.
With the Wapsi so inviting, it was hard to fish elsewhere, but 2023 road trips proved memorable. A January ice fishing trip to Lake of the Woods yielded my largest game fish ever, a 40-inch northern. More than 100 big belligerent smallmouth bass battered my son Fred and me during a late July visit to central Minnesota. Fat orange-finned perch rewarded outings on Pool 9 of the Mississippi River.
The drought also contributed to a successful pheasant nesting season, yielding the highest population in eight years, and enabled hunters to pursue them without muddying their boots. Creek crossings, the bane of aging hunters, were but a distant memory, though dry creeks made it more difficult for dogs to wet their noses.
Now with 2023 in the record books and the drought ongoing, I have to decide whether to downsize my 2024 garden.
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