My Backyard: Destinations
HEARTLAND: Hard Up for Midwestern Fish
By Dave Scroppo
Mar 1, 2005, 12:33

Photos by: Todd Zawistowski

Nothing arouses male instinct and desire quite like a comely female. Right now, on a rainy Friday morning in October, a finned orgy is erupting on the Betsie River, a feeder stream to Lake Michigan, where super-charged Pacific salmon have ascended in the last few weeks to end their four-year life cycle with a final burst of procreative frenzy. In a stretch of less than 100 yards, three females—“hens,” in the vernacular—are fanning the gravel, broadcasting a salmonid come-hither. Behind the hens await squadrons of bucks either poised or in the midst of making their move.

Flipping a twin-fly rig—a couple of split shots, a pea-sized egg fly on top, a nymph on bottom—just behind the hen, I let the setup drift a few feet before there’s a tiny tick at the other end. I set the hook, and the fish goes ballistic, searing line, wallowing, jumping, crashing like a tire iron lobbed in the water. My friend Russ Maddin, a fly guide and likeminded fish-head, and I are whooping and hollering like savages—appropriate considering the atavism and bloodlust salmon wrestling unleashes.

The harder I pull, the more headway I make dragging the salmon cross-current, a cretin approaching 30 inches. Russ offers to net it, but I decline, hauling it atop a sandbar to remove the tiny fly from its gnarly kype, a mouth with canine teeth the size of a hound’s curling from its
bottom jaw. Back across the river, the scintillating hens get busy, the bucks stalking them, more arriving from downstream by the moment.
Did someone say Wild America?

Russ’s and my reason for being is fishing. Russ is cleaning up his act a touch now with a wife and new baby girl, but I have to give credit where credit is due: I learned the true style of Contemporary American Bachelor from him, all the way down to festooning lampshades and draperies with fishing lures.

On several occasions a year, Russ is my entrée into fly angling—salmon roping, steelheading, wintertime streamer slinging for magnum browns on designated trout water—and I am his enabler into the walleye realm of conventional tackle and lures like jerkbaits and soft plastics, all of which might be off-putting to fly guys who frown upon such.

When I moved to Traverse City, Michigan, in 1992, I told a friend from graduate school, a Brit, about the region’s embarrassment of fishes. In classic and erudite understatement, he said that my new home sounded like a “fisherman’s Valhalla.” Sure enough, cold- and warm-water angling unite here in a single area unlike most places in the Lower 48. There are trout streams with native brookies and a century’s worth of natural selection of introduced German brown trout. There are Great Lakes tributaries that swell with river-run salmon and steelhead. There are lakes blessed with big smallmouth bass and thronged with walleye populations boosted by the state’s plentiful stocking. In other words, it’s perfect.

So is our day on the Betsie, a float of less than 4 miles above Homestead Dam, which the salmon have scaled with utter predictability ever since their introduction back in the late ’60s. “They’re all over gravel in such a bad manner,” Russ says, peering over the edge of his custom-made wooden drift boat and into the trout-sized stream jammed with beasts whose backs slice the surface like crude obsidian blades.

Indeed, even if salmon coast every which way with the advance of the drift boat, some even knocking the wooden ribs like the thump on a door, the most preoccupied and, ahem, shameless spawners care not a whit when one of their counterparts is hooked, battled and temporarily removed from the gravelly den of debauchery.

If anything is telling about the salmon’s willingness to strike (something often discounted since their stomachs swell shut to make room for sexual organs, eliminating the actual need to feed), it’s that the bucks we catch are invariably nicked in the tip of the kype with the egg fly. The males, you see, are desperately seeking an aquatic bop, filtering in behind the females. And when they nip our little egg imitation, they are trying to figure out its source. Where is she? So go their fixated brains and amped-up desire. A single-minded longing for the object of their affection—what a cause and inexorable, ineluctable effect upon
a simple mind.

To me, salmon are like naughty girls—you’re fascinated, curious, in it more for the moment than the long haul. Walleye, on the other hand, are bewitching in a whole different way. You stay with them, trying to figure them out, attempting to decipher the mood du jour, even if they shun you. This is why Crawler Boy and I are so entranced by them. These are qualities that Crawler Boy and I cannot escape.

I’d like to take credit for the tender governance of the fish-head we call “Crawler Boy,” real name Tom Barrons, who during his days of, um, marital bliss fished out of a dinghy with a 3-horsepower motor, almost always with nightcrawlers. The first thing he did after his divorce was to buy a 16-foot boat, with a 50-horse, four-stroke outboard, replete with fish finder and electric trolling motor. The next thing was to fish like a man possessed.

Walleye dig these lures.

Tom and I head out to Lake Leelanau the day after the salmon tour de romp. The steady rain of yesterday has yielded to sun,
a puffball cloud or two, and high winds. We could have used the overcast to inspire the walleye, shifty seductresses that elicit a bewildering stew of contrapositions—fear, loathing, ambivalence (not often) and unbridled infatuation (always). But Tom and I are heartened by fall water temps  of 58 degrees. It’s prime time for casting suspending jerkbaits over the weed tops. There’s a lot of water to cover on the 11-mile long lake, but after a decade of my
fishing it (and Tom’s newfound range and versatility), we’ve got the pattern down.

Drifting over the weeds, in 8 to 10 feet of water, we reel down minnowbaits and let them sit up to 20 seconds, then twitch. We twitch again and repeat. In between eight walleyes, we even have a couple of beers. But while one of my favorite patterns is to give the lure six cranks to get it down, I’m lucid enough to try one or two cranks before stopping. That works best. The  walleye, it seems, are hovering above the weeds, closer to the surface and not down in them. You have to be more scientific—or, at least, calculating—to try something different in the ceaseless crusade to figure out the ever-alluring walleye.

At nightfall, we zip back to the launch in the town of Lake Leelanau, and drive to the local tavern, Dick’s Pour House. The tables are crowded with leaf peepers from downstate, so we sit at the bar, where Bobby the bartender tells us jokes and the walls are decorated with fish mounts and deer racks. Across from us are a young couple, the fellow’s girlfriend attractive and charming, with pretty hair and blue eyes.

“Were you guys out fishing?” the boyfriend says.
“Yep,” we say, still wearing Gore-Tex raingear.
“Walleye?”
“Yeah, man.”
“I haven’t eaten walleye in a long time. What would I have to do to get some from you guys?”

Tom and I burst out laughing, conjuring our own version of Indecent Proposal. But we don’t answer. Crawler Boy and I, we’ve got fishing on the brain. Well, most of the time. We share a magnificent obsession, with fish, that’s eclipsed every now and again by our  interest in comely females of an entirely different stripe. Actually, come to think about it, some of us anglers and all of them fishes with their tiny one-track minds, we’re not so much unalike.