Had we looked before we leaped, we never would have taken the trip. But we didn’t, and so we did.
It was a typical late winter outing. You know it’s too early for good steelhead fishing, but you also know a few fish will be in the river — those that spent the winter there along with a handful of early spawners wishing to beat the rush. There’s a few in every crowd, piscatorial and human alike, those annoying individuals who are an hour early to everything and never forget where they put their car keys.
Matt Robinson, a good friend and guide for Boyne Outfitters, and I had plans to float the Pigeon. The section starts out northeast of Wolverine in slower, deeper water before dropping sharply and becoming fast riffle water flowing over boulders. It would be a good time to shovel through the berm in front of my father-in-law’s barn and pull my wooden McKenzie drift boat out of storage.
Nature disagreed with me. Despite shaking and banging and chipping away with a coal shovel, the sliding doors were frozen shut. There would be no McKenzie boat until nature released it. Robinson and I would be wading, which didn’t seem like a good idea when we awoke and the thermometer read 4 degrees.
Still, I wanted to compare the effectiveness of spin fishing with a bobber to fly fishing with a strike indicator (aka bobber) which Robinson has done extensively. We’d start at the Sturgeon, which flows into Burt Lake before heading a little further east to the Pigeon which flows into Mullett Lake.
Parking on the edge of a snowmobile trail, we donned our waders and hiked over crusty snow until we hit the river. It was flowing fast with patches of shelf ice clinging to the banks. We eased ourselves into the water, and the first thing I noticed was cotton-like fuzz covering the rocks. I panicked and thought didymo, or rock snot, had bloomed in the Sturgeon. It’s microscopic algae that looks like brown wet wool, and it became a problem in the Manistee for a few years where it snuffed out insect life. However, this fuzz was transparent. When I kicked it free, it revealed itself. Fine, frozen slush. I dropped my thermometer in the water. The river hovered between 33 and 34 degrees. The chances of catching fish were as low as the temperature.
Robinson and I alternated, one watching the other, which was a good thing because your rod hand only lasted about five minutes before it needed to rest in a deep, warm pocket. Robinson tied on his favorite steelhead fly, a type of San Juan worm he creates with a pink bead head, a pink yarn body, and a pink rubber worm tail. He hung it about three feet below an Oros strike indicator, which is nothing more than a colored, Styrofoam ball that unscrews into two hemispheres. Your line sits in a notch in the middle of the screw thread so that you can tighten the ball and keep the indicator where you set it, but you can easily unscrew the hemispheres half a turn to slide your indicator up or down the line to a new depth. Being a ball, you don’t have to worry about this bobber sitting upright properly. The only problem was that the indicator immediately froze shut, so there was no unscrewing for depth adjustment.
I was using a center pin bobber on a seven-foot spinning rod with eight-pound Maxima. Google Raven floats and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Speaking of which, it’s almost as if people are embarrassed to use the word bobber. Fly fishermen call them strike indicators and center pin fishermen call them floats. Our good friend Drew Oliver has a sticker on his truck that sums it up best, “It’s a bobber, Bro!”
I started off with a plastic bead but quickly lost it in a log and switched over to one of Robinson’s flies. In a nutshell, both techniques, spinning and fly, accomplished the same thing. For Robinson to get a decent drift, he had to repeatedly mend his line, which once you learn to do is no big deal. For me to get a decent drift, I had to keep my rod tip up and for longer drifts, open my bail. In the cold, my Maxima coiled and got stuck in the guides. It probably needed replacing. Robinson’s bobbers froze, but his fly line cooperated nicely.
As the sun rose, slush and ice chunks floated downriver, greatly disturbing our bobbers and our drifts. Neither of us caught fish, but we both enjoyed being on the river and fishing the way we wanted to fish. No surprise there.
The real surprise came when we drove 15 minutes further east to the Pigeon. The river we had planned to float was frozen solid, the one we expected to be most open.
We would have looked very foolish had we pulled up with a boat.
By early afternoon, we were tired from hiking through the snow in waders. The sun had fully come out. We had enjoyed chips and sandwiches in the truck. We were happy. Had we looked before we leaped, we wouldn’t have gone. Sometimes a blind move is the best choice.