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Fishing in da Escanaba
Brown, brook trout rise on U.P. river
June 24, 2004
BY ERIC SHARP
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
CORNELL -- It's 11:15 p.m., and the last of the twilight is fading above the silky pools and broken riffles of the river. In the past two hours, the western sky has dimmed from a burnished mirror too bright to look at to a pale violet streaked with hints of green and gold.
A pair of nighthawks swoops above the dark tops of the pines and maples, picking off mayfly spinners silhouetted against the darkening sky by the thousands as they await the right moment to drop onto the water, lay their eggs and die.
This lingering light was called "the gloaming" when I was a kid in Scotland, as in the song "Roaming in the Gloaming." But we are far from the bonnie banks of Clyde. This is the Escanaba, one of the biggest rivers in the Upper Peninsula, and long, long days in summer are one of the advantages of fishing a stream 300 miles farther north than Detroit and only a stone's throw from the western edge of the Eastern Time Zone.
About 100 yards upstream, Mike Mulier is also just a silhouette. He raises his rod tip, and I see a splash and a smaller silhouette as a brown trout that grabbed his brown drake imitation mayfly leaps through the surface and makes a spirited bid for freedom.
Closer by, the waters at the tail end of a knee-deep pool are pockmarked with the rings made by other rising trout. I have caught six browns 12 to 16 inches there in the past 40 minutes without moving more than 10 steps.
Mulier, who owns Mulier's Market in Grosse Pointe, began fishing this stream about 25 years ago as a student at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. He called to ask if I wanted to join him and a college fishing buddy, Mark Rudness of Marquette, on Mulier's first trip back to the river in six years.
"I called some people I know up there, and they say the brown drakes should start happening any day now," he said. "If we get it right, the brown trout fishing could be fabulous. If not, I know some places farther upstream where we should be able to catch some nice brook trout."
Mulier is one of those guys who make Pollyanna look like a pessimist. He's full of energy and a lot of fun, so I decide that at worst I'll get to investigate some new water, and maybe we even will catch some fish. It turns out he has timed this one right.
"These last few nights are the first good fishing we've had this season," said Larry Wanic of Bark River, president of the Escanaba River Association, which has a clubhouse on the main branch of the river a couple of miles below the impoundment at Boney Falls.
"We've had so much rain and cold weather, and the water was so high and fast, that nobody was fishing. The river has dropped two feet in the last week."
The Escanaba probably held few trout before white settlers arrived. It was too warm for the resident brook trout that lived in some smaller, colder streams, although the lower reaches might have gotten a fall run of big coaster brook trout from Lake Michigan and undoubtedly had a major run of whitefish before dams cut off their access.
The Escanaba then was a smallmouth bass and walleye river, species that still share the waters with trout planted by the state Department of Natural Resources and local angling groups.
"This has been a trout stream for well over 50 years," said Dick Hutton, pastor of Bethany Lutheran Church in Escanaba and vice president of the Escanaba River Association, which has been responsible for much of the habitat improvement along the river. "There have always been a few trout in the Escanaba, at least at some times of the year. We see some big brook trout in May, but they disappear as the water gets warmer. I think they run up the feeder creeks."
The Escanaba probably got its first brown trout not long after the first browns from Europe were put in the Pere Marquette and other Lower Peninsula streams in the 1880s. Rivers throughout Michigan were planted with brown trout by anglers who worked for the railroads and transported baby trout in milk cans cooled with ice.
Donald Campbell, 86, an association member who began fishing on the Escanaba as a teenager 70 years ago, said: "We caught a lot of brown trout back then, and people who were a lot older than me talked about how good it was when they were young."
Known to his fellow club members as "The Old Man of the River," Campbell said trout fishing peaked on the Escanaba in the 1950s and '60s "because the DNR planted more and bigger fish then than they do now. And the reason it's coming back today is because the Escanaba River Association started planting bigger fish."
Hutton agrees, saying: "The DNR and our club both plant fish, and the trout do well because there is so much food for them. The river has an immense amount of insect life, along with a lot of crawfish and other small creatures that trout like to eat."
The DNR planted about 35,000 juvenile brown trout last season, each four to six inches long. The Escanaba River Association planted about 2,500 browns that averaged a foot long, and 1,000 similar-size rainbow trout.
"From the fin clips on the fish people are catching, it's pretty clear that our bigger fish are surviving a lot better," Hutton said. "I think that high water this spring just washed a lot of the small fish the DNR planted down to Lake Michigan."
While big brown trout are the primary draw for anglers at the moment, Wanic and Hutton said they hope to establish a rainbow trout fishery of equal quality.
"So far, the rainbows are doing great," Wanic said. "The guys have been having a ball with them lately. The big question is whether they will stay in the river or turn out to be a migratory strain that heads downstream to the big lake. We're going to do some more habitat improvement that should increase natural reproduction and growth for both browns and rainbows."
In its first major habitat project, the club set big boulders at strategic places in the stream, using a bulldozer to position the rocks during the low water in fall. Wanic said the next project involves blasting trenches out of the flat limestone rock that forms the river bed, giving trout a place to escape the heat of summer and winter ice.
"All you have to do is give them a place that's a foot or two deeper, and it will hold trout," he said. "We know places where there are natural crevices in the rock on the river bottom, and the fish actually get down in those crevices. Some of the most successful fishermen are guys who know where the crevices are."
The Escanaba's insect hatches start in May with Hendrickson, sulfur and blue-wing olive mayflies, followed by a hatch of the river's biggest mayflies, brown drakes, "usually in the first week of June," Hutton said. "But because of the weather, the drakes are hatching a couple of weeks later this year."
July gets a mixture of fly hatches, including a large number of caddis flies, and August brings "a tremendous hatch of Ephoron mayflies, the white fly hatch that brings every big trout in the river out to feed," Hutton said. "We get a lot of blue-wing olives and other small mayflies then, too, and they continue right into September, or even October if the weather stays mild."
We finish our first night on the Escanaba with a nice tally of brown and rainbow trout that are released. Our biggest are about 16 inches, and fishing is so good we're not upset when we learn that those other guys were fishing a quarter-mile upstream because that's where the 20-inchers were.
Next evening, we get to the river just as the brown drake hatch starts. Rudness catches four trout in 30 minutes while Mulier and I each get two, but the wind is blowing 30 knots, and the temperature soon drops into the 40s. The hatch stops about 10 p.m., and my night ends a few minutes earlier when I trip over a boulder while stalking a fish and go bum over teacup into three feet of very cold water.
Which isn't bad, really. It's a great excuse to try the Escanaba again in July.
Brown, brook trout rise on U.P. river
June 24, 2004
BY ERIC SHARP
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
CORNELL -- It's 11:15 p.m., and the last of the twilight is fading above the silky pools and broken riffles of the river. In the past two hours, the western sky has dimmed from a burnished mirror too bright to look at to a pale violet streaked with hints of green and gold.
A pair of nighthawks swoops above the dark tops of the pines and maples, picking off mayfly spinners silhouetted against the darkening sky by the thousands as they await the right moment to drop onto the water, lay their eggs and die.
This lingering light was called "the gloaming" when I was a kid in Scotland, as in the song "Roaming in the Gloaming." But we are far from the bonnie banks of Clyde. This is the Escanaba, one of the biggest rivers in the Upper Peninsula, and long, long days in summer are one of the advantages of fishing a stream 300 miles farther north than Detroit and only a stone's throw from the western edge of the Eastern Time Zone.
About 100 yards upstream, Mike Mulier is also just a silhouette. He raises his rod tip, and I see a splash and a smaller silhouette as a brown trout that grabbed his brown drake imitation mayfly leaps through the surface and makes a spirited bid for freedom.
Closer by, the waters at the tail end of a knee-deep pool are pockmarked with the rings made by other rising trout. I have caught six browns 12 to 16 inches there in the past 40 minutes without moving more than 10 steps.
Mulier, who owns Mulier's Market in Grosse Pointe, began fishing this stream about 25 years ago as a student at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. He called to ask if I wanted to join him and a college fishing buddy, Mark Rudness of Marquette, on Mulier's first trip back to the river in six years.
"I called some people I know up there, and they say the brown drakes should start happening any day now," he said. "If we get it right, the brown trout fishing could be fabulous. If not, I know some places farther upstream where we should be able to catch some nice brook trout."
Mulier is one of those guys who make Pollyanna look like a pessimist. He's full of energy and a lot of fun, so I decide that at worst I'll get to investigate some new water, and maybe we even will catch some fish. It turns out he has timed this one right.
"These last few nights are the first good fishing we've had this season," said Larry Wanic of Bark River, president of the Escanaba River Association, which has a clubhouse on the main branch of the river a couple of miles below the impoundment at Boney Falls.
"We've had so much rain and cold weather, and the water was so high and fast, that nobody was fishing. The river has dropped two feet in the last week."
The Escanaba probably held few trout before white settlers arrived. It was too warm for the resident brook trout that lived in some smaller, colder streams, although the lower reaches might have gotten a fall run of big coaster brook trout from Lake Michigan and undoubtedly had a major run of whitefish before dams cut off their access.
The Escanaba then was a smallmouth bass and walleye river, species that still share the waters with trout planted by the state Department of Natural Resources and local angling groups.
"This has been a trout stream for well over 50 years," said Dick Hutton, pastor of Bethany Lutheran Church in Escanaba and vice president of the Escanaba River Association, which has been responsible for much of the habitat improvement along the river. "There have always been a few trout in the Escanaba, at least at some times of the year. We see some big brook trout in May, but they disappear as the water gets warmer. I think they run up the feeder creeks."
The Escanaba probably got its first brown trout not long after the first browns from Europe were put in the Pere Marquette and other Lower Peninsula streams in the 1880s. Rivers throughout Michigan were planted with brown trout by anglers who worked for the railroads and transported baby trout in milk cans cooled with ice.
Donald Campbell, 86, an association member who began fishing on the Escanaba as a teenager 70 years ago, said: "We caught a lot of brown trout back then, and people who were a lot older than me talked about how good it was when they were young."
Known to his fellow club members as "The Old Man of the River," Campbell said trout fishing peaked on the Escanaba in the 1950s and '60s "because the DNR planted more and bigger fish then than they do now. And the reason it's coming back today is because the Escanaba River Association started planting bigger fish."
Hutton agrees, saying: "The DNR and our club both plant fish, and the trout do well because there is so much food for them. The river has an immense amount of insect life, along with a lot of crawfish and other small creatures that trout like to eat."
The DNR planted about 35,000 juvenile brown trout last season, each four to six inches long. The Escanaba River Association planted about 2,500 browns that averaged a foot long, and 1,000 similar-size rainbow trout.
"From the fin clips on the fish people are catching, it's pretty clear that our bigger fish are surviving a lot better," Hutton said. "I think that high water this spring just washed a lot of the small fish the DNR planted down to Lake Michigan."
While big brown trout are the primary draw for anglers at the moment, Wanic and Hutton said they hope to establish a rainbow trout fishery of equal quality.
"So far, the rainbows are doing great," Wanic said. "The guys have been having a ball with them lately. The big question is whether they will stay in the river or turn out to be a migratory strain that heads downstream to the big lake. We're going to do some more habitat improvement that should increase natural reproduction and growth for both browns and rainbows."
In its first major habitat project, the club set big boulders at strategic places in the stream, using a bulldozer to position the rocks during the low water in fall. Wanic said the next project involves blasting trenches out of the flat limestone rock that forms the river bed, giving trout a place to escape the heat of summer and winter ice.
"All you have to do is give them a place that's a foot or two deeper, and it will hold trout," he said. "We know places where there are natural crevices in the rock on the river bottom, and the fish actually get down in those crevices. Some of the most successful fishermen are guys who know where the crevices are."
The Escanaba's insect hatches start in May with Hendrickson, sulfur and blue-wing olive mayflies, followed by a hatch of the river's biggest mayflies, brown drakes, "usually in the first week of June," Hutton said. "But because of the weather, the drakes are hatching a couple of weeks later this year."
July gets a mixture of fly hatches, including a large number of caddis flies, and August brings "a tremendous hatch of Ephoron mayflies, the white fly hatch that brings every big trout in the river out to feed," Hutton said. "We get a lot of blue-wing olives and other small mayflies then, too, and they continue right into September, or even October if the weather stays mild."
We finish our first night on the Escanaba with a nice tally of brown and rainbow trout that are released. Our biggest are about 16 inches, and fishing is so good we're not upset when we learn that those other guys were fishing a quarter-mile upstream because that's where the 20-inchers were.
Next evening, we get to the river just as the brown drake hatch starts. Rudness catches four trout in 30 minutes while Mulier and I each get two, but the wind is blowing 30 knots, and the temperature soon drops into the 40s. The hatch stops about 10 p.m., and my night ends a few minutes earlier when I trip over a boulder while stalking a fish and go bum over teacup into three feet of very cold water.
Which isn't bad, really. It's a great excuse to try the Escanaba again in July.
