Cicada Madness - A Book Review (...or Endorsement)

We are wrapping up our periodical cicada season here, and I thought it was appropriate to highlight Dave Zielinski’s book Cicada Madness. We recently did a podcast episode on Dave’s book and how invaluable it has been in developing an understanding of this hatch.

Periodical cicadas only hatch once every 13 or 17 years, depending on the species, and so there are very few domain experts out there in the fishing industry. Few fishermen actually chase this hatch year in and year out. As a result, even great fishermen often experience it once, are blown away by it, and then wait for over 10 years crossing their fingers and waiting for the next one. Unfortunately, this also means that there is a lot of pretty bad information that gets disseminated.

For $30 you can pick up a copy of Cicada Madness, read it in a few hours, and then invest a few hours in reading some maps… and actually do a pretty good job in tackling the emergence.  The book is extremely well summarized and lays things out in a very applicable manner. Last year I was able to go from knowing absolutely nothing about the hatch to targeting the same bodies of water that Dave Zielinski and Matt Reilly had traveled to, which speaks volumes to the quality of information in this book.

This year I was able to carve out more fishing time and give it an honest effort. By doing some basic research and being flexible we were able to find bugs and fish that had actually keyed in on them. Most importantly we made some great family fishing memories. We cannot recommend Dave’s book enough for anyone interested in this hatch.

In addition, I was able to fish with Matt Reilly, who specializes in guiding the periodical cicada emergence. Matt is great at what he does and should be on anyone’s list who is interested in taking a guide trip to experience this fishing opportunity. Candidly, given the leg-work involved in finding specific corners of bodies of water and the details around timing, it is well worth it.

Thanks to everyone who has helped make this somewhat unintuitive fishing opportunity approachable and successful! Hopefully we can help in getting information out there from the experts.