It Has begun

About this time every year the phone starts ringing and the email start showing up, How is the salmon run looking? are there any fish in the PM yet?....yup there's fish here, not allot but fish hard and you will hook a couple. what works the best to catch Salmon? Long explanations and  lots of describing later we get it figured out, well this year here is the short list. Ties these on and fish where there are salmon and you will get bit.no need for anything else!!

Storm thunder-sticks

#5 spinners

John with the first king of the year.

The year of Big fish?

This year seems to be shaping up as another big fish year like 3 or 4 years ago. I not sure the reason,more fish eating gobys? Different strain of fish? Whatever the reason there has been some awful big kings brought to the net this year on lake Michigan.
   My good friend Shawn McDonald,who owns the charter boat katch me keeps me up to date on the fishing on the big lake, he has been putting allot of 20 plus pound kings in the boat and yesterday his customer caught one of the biggest I've seen in a long time,this brute was 35.9 pounds....that's whole lot of king. So be prepared for hooking into possibly the biggest king of you life on the PM this year.

Bluegrass and steelhead

Ethan Smith over at Fiddle and Creel, has a great write up on our day spent earlier this year on the Pere Marquette. Ethan is a cool dude and turns out some top notch gear at Smith fly. Give it a read .

The river

Weather-awesome

Water color- slight stain,perfect

Water temp- 34 degrees with slight rise

Fish numbers- good, the whole river system has fish

Tactics- fly rod or spin cast

Baits-Egg flys stone flys and hex nymphs

Get out there and fish this weekend, great fish numbers and slight traffic makes this January thaw a perfect chance.

Three in three

One of the great things about this area of Michigan is that in less than an hour we can be on two other great rivers that fish good for steelhead ,salmon,trout and smallmouth, so for fun and a change of pace we did the Three in Three, three different rivers in three days. Day one- Big manistee which is about 35 miles north.Great river for all style of fishing, big water moderate flow and full of logs, lots of fishy spots to hit and plenty of logs to lose hooked fish.on this day it was Matt Dunn from fishbeer.com and I. Just to make sure we covered all the bases ,we swung Streamers, fished indicators and threw hot-n-tots .Fishing was a little slow but we hooked a couple and landed one nice steelhead

Manistee river steel

Day two was the Pere Marquette river, which is my baby, i love this river not only because its my home river, the sheer tranquility of this river is unbelievable. late fall is quite nobody around and you normally have the river to yourself. The order of the day was fishing floating lines, indicators and egg nymph combos.fishing was fair with most fish ramming logs and brush, although we did manage one that couldn't find any wood.

Pm river chrome


The last day of three was spent on the Muskegon river.the muskegon is about 45 miles south of us and fishes great in the late fall. the "MO" has a later run of kings than the other two rivers so fish will be located around spawners late in the year. The method for the final day was to swing streamers only, of course i always carry a indicator rod just in case we need to mix it up.We slid the boat in and started fishing pockets where spawning kings used to be ,but nothing was around to hold steelhead there,although there were some spawning cohos and i actually had one eat my streamer as i watched of course i jumped the gun and never got a hook in the fish.Later in the day we managed a small steelhead on the indicator rod,that saved the day of the only steelhead hooked. three great rivers in three days what a week.

Last week my good friend and fellow "swing junkie" came up for a few days of steelhead fishing, along with some other childish behavior.  Typically when Scott comes up for a fishing trip, it snows in July,  thunderstorms and rains in February and late fall it goes high sun and t-shirt weather, same goes for this trip, high sun, warm temps and clear water made fishing a challenge to say the least. Swung streamers for a couple days, one day on the Muskegon and one day on the Pere Marquette. We managed  one steelhead on a indicator rig and one brown on the swing along with Beers at the Rendevouz bar, more Beers at Johnny's,  12 pounds of pulled pork sandwiches, five pound of Barbs homemade cookies and one lost fish of unknown species. All in all with a couple of other small trout in between things it wasn't horrible. 

Steelhead on the Brain

Here are just a few Pere Marquette river steelhead from this fall. 

Great Fall steelhead 

Don with a Pere Marquette steelhead

the Master with steelhead greatness 

Dave with a pm river rainbow

PM river steelhead

A day in the life of a guide

Steelhead fishing here on the pere Marquette river can be awesome most of the time....it can also humble the hell out you too, making you wonder if you really have a clue as to what your doing! This was one of those weeks,a few hook ups on egg flys,nothing on the swing and one to the net on a hex nymph oh well it was some great weather.  Oh we caught some suckers too.