Fish With Legs

Secret lake in Michigan yields great bluegills

SOMEWHERE UP NORTH, Mich. -- We all do our share of dumb things during our lives. One of mine was not coming back for 15 years to this tiny northern Michigan pond where I used to enjoy some of the best bluegill fishing I've known.

Dave Smethurst, a founder of the Headwaters Chapter of Trout Unlimited and a longtime environmental and outdoor activist in Gaylord, Mich., invited a couple of us to join him on an evening visit to the lake north of his hometown.

"I'm going to demand a blood oath that you won't name it," he said. "It's a public lake, and a lot of people know about it, but so far we've been fortunate about people obeying the rules and protecting the fishery."

The rules on the lake are artificial flies only and catch and release for all species. Smethurst said that a few people had been caught in the lake using bobbers and worms, and that's a worrisome thing, because a handful of thoughtless or greedy people can wipe out a fishery in no time.

A few years ago I saw the great bluegill and perch fishery at a small lake near my home in Grayling plundered. I watched people filling coolers with 5-inch fish, the same people who a couple of years later were bemoaning the fact that "fishing here isn't like it used to be."

In the middle 1990s, I also fished the little lake Smethurst took us to, but it's a fair drive from my house and there were a lot of other good lakes much closer. I have to admit that none of them has bluegills like these.

In the course of about three hours, three anglers caught dozens of the hard-fighting sunfish, and a lot were 9-11 inchers that bent a fly rod like an 18-inch trout.

The biggest measured a shade more than 12 inches, a fish that would hang over both sides of a dinner plate and weighed well over a pound. It towed an angler in a kayak 50 yards before coming to the side of the boat.

In addition to the gills, we each caught dozens of largemouth bass, most of them 9-12 inches - but a few went 15-16.

"That's pretty typical," Smethurst said. "I don't know why, but I've never seen a 3-pound bass from this lake."

We were fishing surface flies with 4- and 5-weight rods, but I suspect that you'd do just as well with an ultralight spinning rod and small poppers or shallow-running plastics.

The flies that worked well on this evening were a No. 12 stimulator and black balsa popper and some big foam bugs with marabou tails that Smethurst ties. They're about twice the size of the foam spiders found in tackle shops, with a Mylar body wrapped around the hook and the three-quarters of an inch foam shell pulled over the top.

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