Michigan fishing

Michigan’s numerous Great Lakes tributaries are noted for salmon, trout, and steelhead fishing.

Michigan is a state of outdoor fanatics. And with a combined 2 million resident and nonresident fishing licenses sold annually, angling ranks as a big facet in the state’s immense tourism and recre-ational matrix.

Two factors account for the wild popularity of fishing here. First, with more big-water coastline than Florida and Oregon combined, plus 11,000 inland lakes and 3,000 rivers, Michigan has as much and as varied sportfishing as any other state, and far more than most. The St. Clair River alone has 90 species of fish, more than a dozen of them sought by anglers. Gull Lake near Kalamazoo has 52 species and is probably the only place in the world where you’ll hear locals complain about “nuisance” Atlantic salmon that prey on the fish anglers really want to catch, bluegills!

The second factor is that Michigan has something many states lack but which is just as important to anglers as fish: widespread access to virtually all of those waters through some 9 million acres of publicly owned land.

Michigan’s fisheries are primarily coolwater and coldwater, and the state has three distinct climatic and geographic zones.

The Upper Peninsula (UP) is a continuation of Ontario’s Laurentian shield country, where a thin layer of soil over rocky outcroppings grows trees and not much else. Winter comes early, stays late, and brings arctic conditions. Fishing here usually means brook trout on the inland streams, smallmouth bass and pike in the smaller lakes, and salmon in the Great Lakes.

The northern Lower Peninsula, a gigantic sand and gravel pile left behind by the glaciers and that also doesn’t grow much but trees, gets almost as cold as the Upper Peninsula, especially the central highlands. But winter starts a couple of weeks later, spring comes a couple of weeks earlier, and a network of fast-flowing rivers provides much of the best trout water in the state. This zone also offers magnificent smallmouth bass and northern pike fishing, both inland and in the Great Lakes; plenty of walleye, sunfish, perch, and smelt in inland lakes; and anadromous brown trout, steelhead, and Pacific salmon (mostly chinooks) in Lakes Michigan and Huron. The northern waters of the latter two lakes also provide especially fine carp fishing, in waters so clear that fly- and spinning-tackle fans stalk 20- to 30-pound carp like oversize bonefish and can often see their quarry coming at 200 yards.

From Saginaw Bay south, the climate is much milder. Snow and below-zero temperatures occur each year, but they’re generally confined to midwinter, and by March anglers are out in boats while enthusiasts in the northern parts of the state are still ice fishing. There are few trout streams here but lots of bigger, warmer rivers with excellent concentrations of smallmouth and largemouth bass and pike. The area is dotted with lakes teeming with crappie, sunfish, perch, and bass.

The state has shoreline on four of the five Great Lakes: Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie. The principal gamefish in all the big lakes is the chinook salmon, which was imported from the Pacific in 1968, a couple of years after the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) first stocked the Platte River on Lake Michigan with coho salmon. Chinooks grew large and plentiful for a couple of decades, and a state record of 46 pounds, 1 ounce was set.

An outbreak of bacterial kidney disease in the early 1990s drastically reduced the chinook populations in Lakes Michigan and Huron, especially the former. Better disease control in the hatcheries and increased care in selecting eggs from returning fish at weirs have brought the salmon back to excellent levels, and with increased emphasis on stocking lake trout, brown trout, and steelhead, it’s common for anglers to boat five-fish limits comprised of three or four species in a morning.

Cohos also inhabit all four lakes, but these smaller and more acrobatic fish are most common in Lake Michigan. They don’t hang around Michigan waters much, however, and make a big annual circle of the lake, spending the summers largely off Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Thus, chinooks are the primary salmon stocked today.

Steelhead are another immensely popular fish with trolling anglers, and whereas there is some evidence that the first rainbows stocked in Michigan rivers 100 years ago included sea-run subspecies that reached the Great Lakes, all of the rainbows there today are anadromous, although most come from stock that hasn’t been in saltwater for generations.

Before the salmon, there were lake trout—both the fat and the lean species. The lean was far preferred, and it was virtually wiped out by the 1940s due to overfishing, pollution, and the arrival of parasitic lamprey eels. The fat trout, which lives deeper, didn’t come as close to extirpation, but their numbers were also decimated.

Today, lakers are making a comeback in most of the Great Lakes, with the exception of northern Lake Huron. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined that lake trout once again reached a self-sustaining level in much of Lake Superior in 1997, and stocking has produced good populations in Lake Michigan. Ironically, the lake trout that provided eggs for the restocking were mostly descendants of Lake Michigan fish that had been planted in a lake in Wyoming before World War II. Evidence of the well-being of these fish is seen in the Michigan record laker, a 611/2-pound fish caught in 1997 in Lake Superior. It is reportedly the largest lake trout ever caught in the U.S.

Trolling, with crankbaits in spring and spoons throughout the summer, is the principal method of catching Great Lakes salmonids in Michigan. The introduction of the downrigger vastly increased the catch of salmon and lakers in summer, when the fish run deep. Previous to that invention, anglers usually fished wire line, which required far more laborious cranking to wind 200 to 300 feet back onto the reel. Another major breakthrough was the sideplaner board, which dramatically increased the catch of walleye and steelhead by covering more water and positioning the lures away from the boat.

Pacific salmon are one of the primary tourist attractions and economic mainstays of many small towns on the Great Lakes, supporting hundreds of charter boats and tackle shops. Yet many people believe that the DNR has bestowed the salmon fishery with an importance far out of proportion to its economic value and its overall place in the Michigan fishing picture. They argue that far more people spend far more time fishing inland lakes and streams that get short shrift from the DNR, which spends the bulk of its fish hatchery dollars on Great Lakes salmonids.

In the fall, the salmon run up dozens of streams and provide wonderful sport for pier anglers and wading anglers miles from the big water. The primary limiting factors are hydroelectric dams on most rivers, but a new licensing agreement between the federal government, the state, and the hydroelectric companies has regulated water flows through the dams and should improve salmon spawning conditions downstream.

In fact, although trout anglers have generally fought for removal of these dams where possible, in a few instances they objected to the dams’ removal because they feared that allowing salmon and steelhead to run up a stream like the Au Sable would decrease populations of resident brown trout.

Steelhead make their runs mostly in the winter and spring, although the number of summer-run fish is increasing. Steelies often use the same lies as salmon, but smart anglers know that when the salmon are in the streams, fishing a spawn sack below the salmon redds can prompt a smashing strike from a holdover rainbow.

Expecting Michigan walleye anglers to get excited about angling elsewhere is like carrying coal to Newcastle. If you were to name the five great walleye grounds in the world, Michigan accesses three of them: Saginaw Bay on Lake Huron, Little Bay de Noc on Lake Michigan, and Lake Erie. Many inland lakes also abound with walleye, and plants by walleye clubs in places like Whitefish Bay on Lake Superior are expected to spawn new world-class fisheries within a few years.

The involvement of these clubs in running ponds under the aegis of the DNR has been of immeasurable value in improving and preserving the state’s walleye populations. Showing enlightened self-interest, the clubs use volunteer labor to produce fish more cost effectively than a state or commercial hatchery can, and the benefits accrue directly to club members.

Inland, Michigan has thousands of miles of trout streams, ranging from mile-wide major rivers like the St. Marys to creeks you can step across but that can still hold big browns. The grayling that filled rivers in the northern Lower Peninsula before the turn of the century are just a memory, but imported brown, rainbow, and brook trout replaced them everywhere.

A small population of grayling still live in Neff Lake 10 miles west of the town of Grayling, the last survivors of a failed attempt to reintroduce Montana grayling in the 1980s.

Grayling is the city where Michigan’s angling industry began, with Chief David Shopenagon, a revered Indian guide, teaching the craft to white disciples like Rube Babbit before the turn of the century. There were virtually no trout streams in the Lower Peninsula before about 1880. These were the days of the grayling, and the old chief and his fellow guides led sports from across the U.S. and Europe on expeditions that yielded hundreds of fish a day (and sometimes sent thousands of salted fish in barrels to Chicago, New York, and Detroit).

The wretched excess started the grayling’s decline, but the nails were pounded into the coffin by the lumbering industry, which literally hacked down every tree in northern Michigan that was worth cutting. When the loggers were finished, in many areas stump fields that stretched from horizon to horizon were all that was left. Chemicals and sawdust from lumbering operations were poured willy-nilly into the streams, the loss of the forest canopy raised their temperatures, and by the 1920s this fish was extinct.

But anglers abhor a vacuum as much as nature, and it wasn’t long before they began dumping trout into streams that were virtually empty of a top-rank predator. Browns were introduced to the Pere Marquette in 1883 (one of the first plantings in the U.S.), rainbows shortly thereafter in several rivers, and brook trout from the Upper Peninsula were spread to every creek and rivulet that flowed near a railroad line.

The brook trout has been adopted as the official state fish, and its range has spread from its original Upper Peninsula habitat to the southernmost regions of the state. But many people think that a better choice would have been the scrappy smallmouth bass, which was not only native everywhere in the state but today commonly reaches the 4-pound mark.

Michiganders like to boast that their state has more registered boats—about 900,000—than any other, something to be expected in a state popu-lated by fishing fanatics. While bigger boats are required for the rougher water of the Great Lakes, inland-lakes fishing tends to be more of a tin-boat activity. Small aluminum boats in the 10- to 14-foot range, rigged with small outboards, are ideal for launching on many lakes and rivers where the ramps are dirt or grass and the path to them is a narrow forest two-track.

Although these offer some good fishing, the larger specimens of most species are found in the big Great Lakes waters and their bays. As a result, Michigan has some impressive rod-and-reel gamefish records. These include an 11-pound, 15-ounce largemouth bass; a 9-pound, 4-ounce smallmouth bass; a 17-pound, 3-ounce walleye; a 47-pound, 12-ounce muskellunge; a 39-pound northern pike; a 32-pound, 10-ounce Atlantic salmon; a 9-pound, 8-ounce brook trout; and a 26-pound, 8-ounce rainbow trout.

Commercial fishing for game species was virtually ended by the state in the 1970s, but a federal judge ruled that native Americans could still carry on commercial fisheries for salmon, lake trout, and whitefish. This ruling has led to an ongoing conflict between anglers and Indian commercial fishermen, with the former accusing the latter of overharvesting the resource, and the latter accusing the former of attempting to wriggle out of legal obligations. The conflict is greatest in places like Grand Traverse Bay and northern Lake Huron, where the nets of tribal anglers tend to be concentrated in the same small areas where anglers fish.

The present agreement between the state and Indian tribes runs out in the year 2000, and many observers think that the recognition of several new tribes by the federal government in the 1990s, all of which have claimed fishing rights, will make the problem even more difficult to resolve.