Fichigan

Small Stream Trout fishing in Michigan

Archive for the category “Trout Gear”

08 Feb 2013

Spring Steelhead in Small Streams

Mike with Steelhead

Mike scores a Steelhead on the Baldwin

Michigan has an early opener for spring steelhead and depending on how you look at it – it is either the most fun you can have or a good way to destroy your Chinese made fishing reels. Spring steelhead can run upwards of 25 pounds and aren’t shy about hitting lures. It is a science and passion for a lot of anglers. Depending on weather and stream conditions the spring steelhead spawning runs can overlap the opening of the general trout season so you might find yourself casting for a keeper Brown and think you snagged a beaver.

I remember the first time I saw Steelhead in a stream, on the Little Manistee back in the seventies, and it was spooky looking down and seeing these huge fish cruising right next to your legs. There is a momentary panic where you wonder if you are on their menu.

Mike and Denny, if they don’t head up to Pigeon River country for the general opener, will usually check the Baldwin for Steelhead. If they are there, they are game. I should point out that they don’t test their Zebco underspin reels against the big fish, but rather use Shakespeare 1810 reels (circa 1960’s) and stout seven foot rods, equipment more geared to hold and keep bruiser fish out of the log jams. As far as I know they toss lures, not spawn bags, the most popular bait.

The Baldwin River, north and east of the town of Baldwin, is a great brown trout stream in the summer. South of town it empties into the Pere Marquette River which is on everyone’s list as a great steelhead and salmon river. So the big fish take a left turn at the Baldwin and find themselves in some pretty small water comparatively – think 15 foot wide and a foot deep most of the year.  Lots of gravel and lots of tight cover. So hooking a steelhead and landing it on the Baldwin are two separate things.

According to Denny, and this sounds familiar, every year one of them catches all the fish and they go back and forth. The above photo, taken by Denny, is from May of 2010 – so that must be a Mike year, and he’s holding one that may go 12 pounds (best guess) which he may weigh in on if he reads this post.  I wish I could say steelhead was a priority for me, but I’ll trade them all for a twenty inch brown.

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12 Jan 2013

The many days before Trout Camp

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A quiet moment at a rainy opener, Pine River.

Sometime in January every year I start exchanging emails with Feral about the upcoming trout opener and we will discuss with great déjà vu where we should do the opener and our choices always boil down to the Pine River in Lake County or the Pigeon River area near Vanderbilt. Someday we might break out of the cycle by trying something new but for now both places are like old clothing, comfortable with plenty of holes. Feral and I started doing the opener on the Pine back in the late 70’s so there is a lot of history there with good catches of brown trout, memorable camp fun and antics, good guitar jams, and memories of people that would camp with us for one or many years.  Another nice thing about the Pine is we finally know where to find morel mushrooms after years of fruitless search. There’s nothing like frying up a bunch of those after dark and knocking down an icy Labatts.

A not so quiet moment, Pigeon River.

A not so quiet moment, Pigeon River.

The Pigeon River area has its own set of enticements, namely, larger trout potential, and more miles of river including the Black, the Sturgeon, and the Pigeon. Also we might meet up with Mike and Denny and then there’s a little competitive spirit about the fishing, a bigger bonfire, and maybe some lake fishing over at Pickeral when the sun goes down.

It doesn’t really matter which place we go. We always have a great time. Our souls seem to renew with the spring air. Only 15 weeks to the opener.

 

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18 Nov 2012
2 Comments

Movie Starlet holding Trout

I do patent illustration as a free-lance business and as an exercise using adobe illustrator I decided to try doing comic book style line art of movie starlets looking at movie starlets and was getting some interesting results but then thought with a little extra work I could share the art on fichigan. Not sure if the original drawing lost some mystique… but here you can see a Vampiress looking at a Sorceress holding a trout, not to mention a Shakespeare Reel and Wonderod!

I know what you’re thinking: These girls should be wearing waders.

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19 Aug 2012

Volkswagens for Camping

It’s a guy thing. Moving from vehicle to vehicle as a statement. Jake, like Feral, gravitates to unusual vehicles. I doubt he’ll ever drive a Ford. I never know what he’ll show up with at trout camp but I am often inspired to take a photo. For a while he was on a VW mode and that was entertaining.

The bug was cool though I seem to recall packing a guitar and camping and fishing gear was an exercise in physics or at least bending atoms. We insist on a guitar since he does some very interesting finger picking including some Chet Atkins. He also plays bass and one time he showed up with a stand-up bass packed into the rear end of a GEO tracker. Another exercise in physics.

Jake pulled into fall trout camp with the above VW camper van several years ago and that drew a crowd. I believe the pop top allowed a person to stand up inside though you couldn’t walk very far.  Also, there were some clever mechanics that positioned a cot near the ceiling. I wish I would have taken more pictures because it really was a classic. He sold that and that seems to be the way with him and Feral. Life is too short to keep driving the same thing for very long.

This year Jake showed up with a new Jeep which is a little surprising because Feral, his dad, has a history with Jeeps and many Jeep repair stories. Below is a photo of Feral back in the seventies ready for bow hunting, something we keep talking about because in Michigan the second that trout season ends – bow hunting begins. So that would be an excuse not to break camp and head home. I’m not interested in harvesting a deer, but the woods are spectacular in October.

Here is another Feral Jeep with some guitar jamming in the foreground. Feral had good luck with this Jeep and drove it for a while – at least a year and maybe longer. Jake is finger picking a classical guitar, Feral is playing a Dobro, and that’s a 1970 Martin D-35 in the foreground which I sold. Guitars are like cars: Life is too short to keep playing the same one your whole life. Going back to Jeeps, check out the one Natch brought to trout camp a couple years ago on the post about Pickerel Lake. Natch drove us down a treacherous trail to the  to the Sturgeon River that still makes me smile. Deep ruts and odd angles. Jeeps are good for that – going where no man has gone before. Something Feral did with the Dobro.

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27 Jun 2012
2 Comments

These Fish were not Photoshopped

This nice brace of trout was caught by Feral some time before the turn of the century.  If I recall the story correctly he passed a couple worm fishermen walking the bank upstream, caught the trout in ten minutes, and walked back past them heading downstream. The worm fishermen couldn’t believe their eyes.  A proud moment.  They were kind enough to take this photo and I have been trying to figure out ever since where exactly on the Pine River he caught them.  If you look closely something doesn’t seem right.  Feral assures me the trout have not been photoshopped, but concedes everything else might have been.

Original photo!

Posted in Trout Gear
24 Jun 2012

Fixing a Fishfinder Transducer

I know I keep veering away from trout fishing and promise to get back to it soon – but this may be important to a fisherman somewhere. I have an older model Humminbird fishfinder, a Wide Eye, from the eighties. The wires to the transducer were sheared (or pulled off) right at the transducer puck. I did some research online and found a replacement for $77.16 at Amazon, but, based on an email to Humminbird Service, I couldn’t be sure the replacement transducer works with my older model. (Service said my unit is so old there are no replacement parts and I should buy a new fishfinder – uuhhh… thanks for the advice?)

I trolled the web to see if there was a way to fix it. The word on the web is: buy a new one because you can’t repair them. I could see their point, in my case the wires I needed to reconnect are encased in the plastic compound of the puck, sort of like Hans Solo encased in Carbonite, but less to work with.

I decided to do surgery on the puck. (What did I have to lose?) The main issue was getting to the wires inside. I took a 1/8th  inch drill bit and made small holes all the way around the spot where the wires exit. I drilled just deep enough to break though the molded plastic seal. Then I chipped away the plastic until I could see the two wires, one black and one red (matching the wires encased in the cable). The wires are tiny – so extreme care has to be taken to work them free of the plastic seal. Once they were free I was able to strip the coating off the two wires using an exacto knife and a lot of patience.

Then I did the same thing with the cable end – stripped and exposed enough of the wires so I could hold and solder them to the wires in the puck. I used a pencil type soldering iron with a fine point. Once the wires were soldered I filled in the hole and soldered joints with two part epoxy. I gobbed on enough so that it covers the cable where it exits the puck. Hopefully it’s as strong as carbonite so the wires don’t pull out again.

The Test: I took the boat out on a local lake and it seems to be working better than ever. It zeroed right in on the bottom. If you are on a budget – don’t trash the transducer. Dig out and solder together the broken off wires and gob up the hole and wires with epoxy. Save yourself eighty plus dollars with very little effort.

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01 Apr 2012
9 Comments

Shakespeare Wonderod

Back when Shakespeare was on the cutting edge of fishing equipment and my grandfather was doing trick casting demonstrations for them at trade shows, they would send Jake free equipment to try out. He stored his arsenal of fishing rods on a rod rack on a wall of his bedroom. Grandma didn’t complain that I know of but those were different times and I can’t imagine what my wife would say. As a little boy the fishing rods were a great source of interest to me and sneaking into his bedroom to look at them was a regular occurrence.

Jake had a favorite set-up – his “go to” rod and reel for most trout fishing and after he passed away it fell into my hands. I store the rod and reel in an old case and have not been tempted to use it even though as a kid I would have done anything to get my hands on it. The brown Wonderod stood out on his rod rack  and had a certain mystique mainly because over the years we associated that rod with Grandpa and many creels full of trout. It was like Minnesota Fat’s pool cue – there must be magic in it.

Back then fiberglass was the new thing – does that date this story? The rod was designed to go with the company’s closed face spinning reels, notably the 1810 and the 1756. The rod has a sliding reel seat over a lengthy cork handle and when the reel is attached it is attached at the butt of the handle. This allows the user to pinch the fishing line against the cork handle before releasing the bail. After the bail is released the cast is made and line released using the index finger – allowing great control over when to release the line and thereby helping casting accuracy. The line is stopped by using the same index finger to pinch the line against the handle – so the caster can stop the lure mid-air over the target. Jake achieved deadly accuracy (trout Point of View) using this set-up along with his underhand flip cast.

If you are a fisherman and ever wondered why 1810 and 1756 reels are mounted so close to the rod, that is the reason – so the line is easy to pinch against the rod handle. Modern spinning reels are mounted a good distance from the rod making manual control over the line almost impossible. I keep waiting for a tackle manufacturer to figure this out but I won’t hold my breath.

I am considering using Jake’s brown Wonderod and 1756 reel this spring as I know there is still some magic there and it will make my brothers jealous.  Note to myself: lock pole in trunk when not in use.

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23 Nov 2011

Trout Season Bucket List

If you are a trout fisherman the close of the general trout season in September means seven months until you get back into a trout stream. Whoa… I never added it up before … that is a long time. The following bucket list might better be called a reverse bucket list, things to do to pass time so you don’t die waiting for the last Saturday in April.

  1. Read Tom Sawyer. Seriously. You’ll laugh.
  2. Try ice fishing. Last year Feral and I tried a couple lakes and bombed entirely, so my best advice is get good advice on how and where, or better yet, talk an experienced ice fisherman into dragging you along. Dress in layers – if you start sweating it’s all over.
  3. Deer hunt. I understand the number of deer hunters decline every year and it is important to control the size of the herd – hunting solves that problem.  Note: Feral went out on opening day (gun season) and shot a six point! He had the woods to himself.  He was surprised. Michigan has seasons for archery and muzzle loading also – up to the end of December.
  4. Lose twenty pounds. (Secret: low carb diet first two weeks while starting 30 to 40 minute morning treadmill routine, 5 times per week. Ask your doctor if it makes sense for you.)
  5. Make your own spinning rod. Hmmm. I always thought that sounded fun. I believe there are rod building classes at Al and Bob’s Sporting Goods store on Division Ave.
  6. Paint a masterpiece. Ok.. this one is directed at some of my buddies that dabble in this sort of enterprise. You have a year before the next Art Prize contest in Grand Rapids and a shot at fame and fortune.
  7. Join a club. This one may sound really out there to the socially awkward loners I normally spend time with, guys like me. Still, I have tried it a few times. I joined the Grand Rapids Songwriters a few years back and had fun. Met some great people. They meet once a month and play original songs. There are groups for just about every hobby and pastime you can imagine. Take a chance?
  8. Invent something.
  9.  Change the oil in your car. Obviously, I’m struggling at this point.
  10. Buy a time machine or lapse into a seven month coma. Bingo, its trout season again.
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29 Oct 2011
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My Short History of Bass Tournaments

Reeds Lake 1951, Jake Lucas (Not just a trout fisherman!)

My neighbor knew I was a trout fisherman and asked if I’d be interested in fishing some bass tournaments. This was back in the 1980s. I jumped at the chance. He had a nice bass boat, something completely foreign to me, and I knew he did some local tournaments regularly. He was a master with plastic worms and taught me the basics. As a team, we didn’t do that well the summer we fished together and I blame myself -I should have been experimenting more. (He got me started on plastic worms and there was no turning back.) He eventually dumped me for a guy that should have gone pro. That was a brief letdown but it didn’t take me long to get back into tournaments.  Generally it is a team fishing sport – two guys in a bass boat. There was no rule requiring two guys in a boat – anyone that paid the entry could fish alone if it came to that, and being a bit of a loner anyway, I decided to try it. I had a twelve foot aluminum boat, a trolling motor, and a Subaru station wagon to put it on. I rigged up a cooler as a live well and started entering tournaments – against guys like my old neighbor and his talented semi-pro friend.

The start of a tournament is pretty macho. I would pull my aluminum v-bottom out into the mix of overpowered bass boats revving their engines and smell the gas fumes and try to hang on as their wakes rocked my boat. As soon as the water settled I’d point my boat to the nearest shore and start tossing whatever made sense. I kept up on the latest BASS news so my arsenal was current if not overwhelming. Reeds Lake in East Grand Rapids was my main tournament. Wednesday nights. The tournament was three hours ending at 9:00PM. Next to the boat launch is an elaborate expanse of docks jutting out behind Rose’s Restaurant, and that was always my first stop. Other anglers hit these docks too, but I had a nice advantage – I could maneuver my little boat inside the jutting structures and fish very quietly, backing the little boat around. I took my time and that can be a good thing.

The tournaments usually paid three places, but sometimes five places if there were a lot of boats. Winning was based on total weight brought in. They had a giant analog scale and basket to load the catches so you could watch the dial swing around and jitter on the weight. Weigh-ins drew a crowd, not just the anglers.

I placed just often enough to break even over my tournament lifetime which was pretty good. It was always a thrill to go home with fifty or a hundred bucks and slap it down on the counter to my wife’s surprise and glee.  The other cool thing was getting respect from those teams of fishermen who shook their head at the guy in an aluminum boat. It really wasn’t about the money. It was somewhat about the competition. But mainly I just like to go fishing.

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05 Oct 2011
21 Comments

1961 Apache Chief Tent Camper

Camping near Grass Lake marsh

I found the tent camper pictured above in the want ads for $200.00.  I won’t say when, but I will say I have owned it longer than the original owners, so that would make me older than the camper. They took great care of it and their main advice was never put it away wet. I took that advice and after all these years the canvass is still 100%.

It’s a great piece of engineering. It has an aluminum box on wheels with doors on the side for storage, a mattress on top of the box, and a full size tent with attached collapsible tent poles that fold over the mattress for storage. The mattress keeps me off the ground in cold weather, it absolutely doesn’t leak, there is room for two more guys on the floor plus an aisle down the middle so it’s roomy enough for three if need be. The storage compartments handle all my camping gear including sleeping bags, a screen tent, tarps, cookware, tackle and tool boxes, etc. In bad weather, which can happen at either end of Michigan’s trout season, it stays warm inside with just a propane lantern.

There is a coolness factor to owning and using something this old. People ask about it at campgrounds and want to look inside. Apache had a great idea. I guess the popularity of dinette campers convinced them to abandon the idea. That’s really too bad since it is such a practical design.

Around ten years ago Feral bought a similar used camper of a different brand. Feral painted some Ghost Brown Trout on the box, inspired by a humorous rewrite of the classic cowboy song “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”

(see youtube for the video “ghost brown trout.” Feral does some mean electric mandolin, Luther on vocals.)

Update: This camper is a 1960 JC Higgens, manufactured by the same company (Vesely Mfg.) for Sears. It is very similar or identical to the  1960/61 Apache Scout.

1961 Apache Scout - click on image to enlarge

1961 Apache Chief

If you see these tent campers together at a campground or remote spot somewhere in northern Michigan, stop in and say hello. We’re friendly. If you like to eat trout we may have some extra in the cooler you can take home for your dinner.

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