Michigan’s Steelhead Superhighways
An early winter sunrise in Michigan’s Great Lakes wonderland greets you with all its savage beauty. Blistering lake-effect snow squalls and freezing temperatures are enough to break the spirit of even the bravest individual. Yet, as you wade or float down a beautiful Lake Michigan tributary, you remain optimistic and focused. Deep down you know there is a silver lining—a reward for enduring Mother Nature’s wrath.
As you drift and swing your fly through the river’s prime lies and transition water, you delve into a secret, transcendental world of the “meditation of the big grab and pull.” For a brief moment, as the snowflakes dance among the towering pines and cedars, you feel a sense of timelessness and soothing silence—you’ve become one with the river. In a sudden act of graceful violence, your fly stops, the rod throbs, and 12 pounds of chrome savage steel breaks the surface and sends your reel screaming into its backing.
When pioneers Seth Green and Daniel Fitzhugh brought their California steelhead experiment to the Great Lakes in the 1880s, little did they expect that the magnificent rivers on Lake Michigan’s eastern shore would someday become a Mecca for these anadromous transplants. With storybook rivers like the Big and Little Manistee, Pere Marquette, Muskegon, and White, to name a few, these systems produce hundreds of miles of steelhead superhighways that rival their West Coast counterparts.
Enchanted River Ecosystems
As the glacial ice retreated north over the Great Lakes 12,000 years ago, the Lower Peninsula of Michigan was formed. The ice sheets left behind glacial till, sand, gravel, and rocky moraine—perfect components to create ideal steelhead and trout waters.
With moderate gradients that foster the influx of artesian spring water, the unique ecosystem of Lake Michigan’s tributaries was well underway. While the quick and volatile spates of severe-gradient rivers elsewhere are often destructive to natural reproduction, these gentle, cool-flowing rivers quickly became the “Ritz Carlton” residences for the new Pacific imports.
Lake Michigan’s tributaries vary from moderate-size rivers to large tailwaters with steeper gradients. Most of these rivers have large estuaries where they flow into the lake. In such places there is a rich aquatic ecosystem where wild steelhead reproduction and growth is immense.
The rivers run clear with large amounts of gravel for natural reproduction. Given that there’s little soil runoff from agriculture—only sand—steelhead eggs are seldom smothered and choked by silt, which occurs on other Great Lakes rivers. In addition, the tailwaters of the Muskegon and Manistee—vast river systems—were the first in the country to be licensed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in 1992 for run-of-the-river natural, stable flows. These flows have greatly boosted the rivers’ natural reproductive capacities.
Stocked steelhead smolts come from a 100 percent wild genetic bloodline of Michigan-strain fish raised from eggs and milt stripped from wild Little Manistee fish at that river’s weir. This means that even if you stock 90,000 smolts in the Grand River, you are stocking genetically wild fish.
Also, rearing wild eggs in a hatchery is almost like raising these fish in the finest prep/boarding school, where they get three meals a day and a steady flow of water. They miss the challenges of droughts, heat waves, anchor ice, or falling prey to predators such as walleye, pike, bass, other trout, and kingfishers. When these smolts are stocked in the river, they have the instincts of wild steelhead. When they return as adults and take your fly, they are ready to take you for a high-speed ride down the river and into your backing.
Flies and Techniques
Given the great range of food items in Lake Michigan and its tributaries, steelhead form strong predator/prey relationships during early imprinting. The abundant biological drift of the rivers drives the adult steelhead’s instinctive predatory response. Egg patterns, nymphs, Bunny Buggers, Speys, Leechsicles, tube flies, Popsicles, sculpin imitations, baitfish streamers, and even dry flies should all be in your arsenal.
Michigan steelhead are available in the rivers for up to 10 months, from September to as late as June. During the big mayfly hatches in late May and June, drop-back steelhead often take a Gray Drake or Isonychia imitation if the hatch is thick enough. In April, black stoneflies on the surface often draw strikes from jack males pushed off the spawning gravel by larger alpha males.
Bottom-drift nymphing is the most important technique for Michigan steelhead, but steelheaders are increasingly swinging flies on two-handed Spey rods, using Skagit lines with Rio T-14 heavy-grain heads. Nymphing with and without strike indicators is a great way to cover small- to medium-size rivers. Spey rods are also ideal for indicator nymphing using a quick-snap, “push-pull,” flip-over cast. Large white Float Master teardrop indicators (floatmasterco.net) are excellent for fishing with split-shot and nymphs, and they match the white flotsam on Michigan’s peat-stained rivers.
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
Comments