- Hello, everyone, Welcome to "Michigan Out of Doors."

I'm Jenny Ciolek, and we've got an exciting show headed your way this week.

Jordan will take us out salmon fishing on a small boat on Pere Marquette Lake over on the west side of the Mitten.

The action was fast and furious.

You won't wanna miss that story.

And Jimmy's got a couple of other items for us this week, too.

- Well, that's right, Jenny.

We do have a few more things on this week's show.

To go along with our really good salmon fishing on this week's episode, we're gonna show you a really good salmon recipe that you may wanna try at home, and we're gonna visit with Second Chance Bird Dogs and you can guess from the name, it's where they take bird dogs and give them a second chance.

You won't wanna miss that story.

Lots of good stuff on this week's show.

You stay tuned.

I'm Jimmy Gretzinger, and it's time for "Michigan Out of Doors".

♪ From the first spring rains ♪ To the soft summer breeze ♪ Dancing on the pine forest floor ♪ ♪ The autumn colors catch your eyes ♪ ♪ Here come the crystal winter skies ♪ ♪ It's Michigan, Michigan Out of Doors ♪ - [Hunter] What a beautiful day in the woods.

♪ Some day our children all will see ♪ ♪ This is their finest legacy ♪ Wonder and the love of Michigan ♪ ♪ As the wind comes whispering through the trees ♪ ♪ The sweet smell of nature's in the air ♪ ♪ From the Great Lakes to the quiet streams ♪ ♪ Shining like a sportsman's dream ♪ ♪ It's a love of Michigan we all share ♪ - [Announcer] "Michigan Out of Doors" is presented by, by Country Smoke House, a sportsman's destination since 1988, featuring varieties of homemade sausage, jerky, brats, and gourmet entrees.

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(light music) (machines clanking) - [Narrator] At Boss Shotshells, we make all our shot shells right here in Michigan and deliver them direct to your door.

(light rock music) (rock music) (rock music continues) (gentle guitar music) - [Jordan] Last week, I was able to spend an evening on the water in a familiar place, Pere Marquette Lake.

Although I've spent several days on this body of water, I've never fished it in October.

And about 30 seconds into our trip, I realized that there's still good fishing to be had here this time of year.

This one just popped.

- Some fish on it, that's right.

Yeah, there's a fish.

(laughs) Just put the rod down, and looks like we're locked up with the king already.

That did not take long.

I literally just had that the second rigger and you're like, "I think a fish went off."

I thought the clip just tripped.

Yeah, that's the king for sure.

(reel whirring) Might need a hand with the net here in a moment.

Looks like Barrett's got that all tied down.

(water splashing) (reel whirring) It's a nice thing to run.

Number one, there we go.

I did not think it was gonna happen that fast either.

So today we're in Ludington, Michigan, beautiful afternoon.

It's actually a Friday, and believe it or not, we are one of the only boats out here, possibly the only boat.

And we are chasing staging king salmon.

These are fish moving up off of Lake Michigan, about to make their annual run up the Pere Marquette River behind me.

And we're just trolling plugs.

It's a very simple and effective way to catch these fish.

Just throwing 'em big gaudy colors.

Some of the base have rattles to 'em, but it's a pretty effective way to run a lot of lines and catch a lot of fish.

And so it's been a weird year this year.

It's been abnormally warm for another fall yet again here in northern Michigan.

And because of that, we haven't had a lot of our fish running up the river on the same timeframe that they usually are.

So we're targeting them out here still on the lake in October, which is unseasonably late.

But we got a good mixed bag of fish.

We got mature fish, small fish, chrome fish, dark fish, plenty of play with, and they're a lot of fun.

- [Jordan] Robert's love for fishing started many years ago, and the Ludington area has always been a part of his fishing journey.

Nowadays, he spends a ton of time in this part of the state throughout the year, - Fishing started early just through my family.

both grandparents, my dad, going up to Canada, fishing in ponds.

And we always had an annual tradition of fishing here in Ludington, and I'd go out on salmon charters and that kind of birthed it all.

Once I saw the potential of what could come out of Lake Michigan, I was always fascinated by that.

And here we are many years later, doing it for fun every day.

Our season changes a lot.

We'll get some Spring kings here, and that's a little bit hit or miss.

But coming more into 4th of July, we'll start targeting kings offshore on the shelf.

One of the most spots in the entire Great Lakes to catch salmon where the state record was actually caught a couple years back.

And we'll chase them off shore, follow 'em in shore.

Every time the lake flips, we'll get fish that push near the pier heads, work their way into the lake, and then essentially, we just follow 'em up the river.

And that season for salmon usually dies off about, really, supposed to be in October, the end of October.

But these warmer years, it's a little later.

And then we transition into our steelhead season all the way through the late fall into late spring.

And little mixed species day, I guess.

We got a nice coho.

Beautiful fish, look at that thing, full of eggs.

That is a nice coho.

I mean, truly.

Hooks out.

Later in the year here, we'll get pushes of coho a little later than our kings, and my gosh, that is a gorgeous fish.

Just that purple hee across it.

Wild fish.

And we got one on the planer bar now.

(laughs) Yep, he is there.

Oh, he's going airborne back there.

See him?

Looks like another coho, actually.

And it is.

Not complaining about that meat.

That is for sure.

Gorgeous.

Doubled up on beautiful coho.

All right, so we just took another pass through the hole and doubled up on some nice cohos right here.

These are gonna be excellent table fare.

You can see just right off the lake, clean fish.

Looks like we got a mixed bag today.

Got some darker fish, we got some lighter fish, and we got a couple different species.

Can't complain.

We're going through a lot of unseasonably warm weather right now, and because of that, it's halted a lot of fish in these staging areas, like these inland lakes, washed out river mouths.

And these fish are simply just waiting for the right conditions to run.

A lot of times, it takes a big rain, a hard cool down for a couple of days to really cool that water off and make it conducive for good spawning conditions.

And we just simply haven't had that.

We've had some rain sprinkled throughout September and August, and we've gotten pushes of fish in the river.

But even just with the big lake set up, our thermocline, which is essentially the temperature break is still super deep.

And because of that, we're just getting a lot of late runs of fish this year.

And so we should really have good fishing throughout here all through mid and late fall.

- [Jordan] This style of fishing requires pretty minimal equipment compared to fishing on the big lake.

And although we were using a live scope today, it's certainly not a necessity, but it was interesting to see how the fish responded to our plugs.

- And a lot of times, what'll happen is your downriggers will bring fish into your spread.

So even if he doesn't hit our down rigger, he could move on over to the three color that we have out.

But, look, you can see there's fish that are keeping up with our baits right there.

See if we can entice one.

Oh, there it is.

Try not to say that.

I mean, I might have just spoke that into existence.

I don't know, Jordan.

It feels like a king.

(light music) I wouldn't say the live scope necessarily catches you the fish, but it more or so just shows you how they're interacting with your bait.

And as we saw, we had a nice aggressive fish come right up on downrigger bait.

And that just tells me that there's fish that are hot and are bity.

Hope he doesn't get in our other three color.

I feel like trolling gets a bad rep, but when you're catching 'em this close to the boat and they're this fresh, you're feeling everything.

Well, we are having ourselves a heck of a day this afternoon.

It's pretty much as fast as we can get the rods down.

Just lost two kings, and as soon as we put a plug down again on the rigger that went, we just landed this nice female king salmon.

Very fresh, came up as of recent, and probably another good eater.

- [Jordan] We caught fish on a few different plugs throughout the night, but I asked Robert to take me through some of his favorites for this style of fishing.

- Some dream weaver plugs here.

Lucky charms is a good one.

Got some silver hoards, green back, ladder back, all glow on the bottom.

Classic.

But yeah, just some rattle and some bright colors and it's doing the trick.

(reel whirring) It feels smaller, are you still there?

Glow plugs are starting to shine a little more now that we're getting in that lower light period.

He wants to get in my lines right now.

He is racing to the front boat.

Please, do not.

Oh, it's a coho again.

Yep.

Really nice coho.

Another good one for the grill.

There we go, beautiful fish.

Look at that one.

That is a gorgeous coho.

- [Jordan] Sunset.

- [Robert] Can't beat it, man.

Can't beat it.

- [Jordan] 80 degrees and sunny may not be the best weather for sitting in a tree stand, but it was perfect conditions to take advantage of a great fall bite.

Thanks to Robert for taking me out.

It was a great day on the water here in West Michigan.

(light guitar music) - Well, one of my favorite things to do this time of the year is to get out and do a little upland hunting and chase some bird dogs through the woods.

In this next story, we're gonna introduce you to a guy that's taken some bird dogs that might need a second chance.

(gentle guitar music) - He's a wire hair.

We started about eight years ago.

We take in bird dogs that people either don't want or people can't handle, dogs with issues, and we train them to hunt and rehome them into hunting homes.

I get dogs from all over.

I've gotten dogs as far as Idaho, Texas, California, Florida, and then local.

Get dogs from all over the United States.

And we home dogs all over the United States.

This is Phoenix.

He's only been here for about a week and a half.

He's never seen a bird, never had an e-collar on, never hunted.

I should correct myself there.

I'm sure he's seen birds.

He's never seen a bird in a hunting situation.

So all we're gonna do today is put a pigeon out for him right in the yard here and just see what he does with it.

- [Jimmy] I was introduced to Mike by some bird hunting buddies and I was excited to learn how he does what he does with dogs that are both young and even older dogs that some would say maybe are too old.

- So I take everything that owner said, the previous owner, kind of a grain of salt, 'cause I've gotta start from scratch, right?

Start from scratch, from the puppy stage, whether they're eight weeks old or five years old.

I start 'em all at the same point, putting 'em on birds, see if they point.

And then we go over gun intro and everything like that.

- [Jimmy] Today, we would be looking at dogs in various stages of development, with the goal of turning them all into good hunting dogs.

- We want only one new thing a day.

So for him today is birds.

Today, birds is his new thing.

So this session might be over for today.

Tomorrow, we're gonna go out to the training field.

We're gonna run around the training field, and we're gonna start e-collar training him.

The next day, we'll go out, we'll be in the training field, and we'll introduce birds in the training field and we just elevate that every day till we have everything in place.

- [Jimmy] Mike has been doing this for many years and has some good success in matching up dogs with folks looking for a good hunting companion.

- Wag.

And I'll do this every day.

One thing that I do very differently with my training is I do everything natural.

So I don't wanna have to teach the dog to whoa.

I want the dog to do all that naturally.

So I will do this every day with him until I see what I wanna see with him.

And once I have that, then I build from there.

If I need the whoa train it, we can whoa train it.

But he doesn't even have a season under his belt yet.

So he needs to have one good season under his belt.

You can watch how he's hunting.

He's hunting really good.

He's using his nose.

He's going back and forth.

This is all things he's learned in the last couple weeks.

This will only be bird number three for him.

He's only been on two other birds.

Right there.

(wings flapping) - How'd he do?

- Did very well.

He's still very much a puppy.

Everything that I see in him is still puppy.

I've got a four-month-old puppy that if I put on birds, acts just like that.

- [Jimmy] Mike has some young dogs, but also some older dogs as well.

And it was interesting to see what can be accomplished in one session, especially when you have the correct tools.

What are we working on here?

- So you can see this guy pulling me across the yard here.

This is a 13-month-old.

His name's Pinky.

And he was brought to me by a family that bought him as a puppy as their first bird dog, and a first bird dog to anybody should not be a Drahthaar 'cause you see what happens.

And he was spoiled.

He was very well taken care of, which is unfortunately, a lot of the dogs they get are very well taken care of, but they're spoiled.

And what's going through his mind right now is nothing that I want him to do.

Everything that's going through his mind is what he wants to do.

So what I like to do is get these dogs back on center.

I like to get these dogs kinda listening to me.

One thing that I like to do with these dogs, I like to be able stand over top of 'em, if they let me.

And once they let me, I like it.

You see him fight it.

He doesn't want me to, 'cause he is a big dominant male.

Good.

Once he relaxes and lets me, this is called a herm springer prong collar.

And this is designed with these prongs to be a pressure on, pressure off trading method.

If he's good and he doesn't pull, there is no pressure or anything like that.

The second he pulls, you see, this is the first time he is ever gonna have this on.

I saved this for today.

And you see how much better he's already reacting.

It's amazing what this tool can do for a dog that you just saw me getting pulled across the yard and now I've got a dog with a loose leash, 'cause he feels that pressure on his neck.

If he wants a lot of pressure, like right there, he tried going the other way and it pinched his neck a little bit.

And what people don't realize is if they were to do this in their yard with a troubled dog for like 15 minutes a day is all you gotta do.

And that's what I'll do with him for the next six months is me and him walk like this every day.

If he wants to go this way, I turn and go this way.

He wants to go that way, I turn and go this way.

You see him try to bite the leash.

He's fighting it a little bit.

But he was pulling me across the yard.

Good, sit.

Okay.

Now I've got a dog that listens to me.

He's doing remarkably well for his first time.

This doesn't usually happen like this.

He must know we're filming.

- [Jimmy] Well, whether the dog knew the camera was there or not, that was really interesting to see.

Now, it was time to check out a little bit more advanced dog.

- Rogue basically is a started dog at this point.

The only thing we haven't done with him yet is shoot a bird while it's flying through the sky.

So I've released birds in launchers with wing feathers pulled and shot the gun over him, but never actually shot a bird for him.

So this'll be his first time doing this today.

You can see how amped up and excited he is.

I know.

Settle, settle.

Good boy.

- [Jimmy] It was really fun to see the different stages that the dogs are in and to watch a dog be introduced to an actual hunting situation.

- There he is.

So one of the biggest reasons why I use launchers is 'cause I can control the situation.

I know exactly where the bird's at.

It hasn't moved.

It's not going anywhere until I push a button.

So you can be here on point, I can load a gun, I can get ready, get people situated, whatever I gotta do.

And I know that bird's not going anywhere.

Really, it's safer for me and him this way, 'cause I know he's not gonna have any negative reaction.

So I'm gonna do is launch this bird.

He should chase it, and then hopefully, it doesn't fly right into the sun.

It's loaded, it's ready.

(gun firing) Where'd it go?

- [Jimmy] Well, in this case here, the dog did a good job and responded about how Mike was hoping.

- Good boy, Rogue.

- [Jimmy] So what are the next steps for this dog?

- So this dog, as of right now, we've shot a bird over him.

He's ready to be adopted.

Do I wanna work on retrieving them?

Yeah, I could.

But at this rate, he's so young.

Put a season under his belt and see what he does after he is done with that season.

You take him to a preserve, which is what 90% of my clients do is preserve bird hunt.

You take him to a preserve and hunt over him the next eight months, he'll be bringing birds back to you naturally.

Bird's not gonna fly very good.

Maybe he'll give me a shot.

(gun firing) He saw that one.

Good boy!

Here, Rogue, here.

Here, here, here.

- [Jimmy] Mike does a great job, and I asked him just who is in the market for this kind of a dog, and how does he match them up with the right owner.

- So my clientele is basically, I would say 45 to 65-year-old people that don't want a puppy.

They don't want a puppy to chew their shoes, but they also want a hunting dog.

So they come to me, they explain to me exactly what they want, and I find a dog that lines up with all those needs.

And then I approach them about the dog and they always come meet the dog.

And that's my base clientele right there.

- [Jimmy] For more information on Mike and his dogs, just Google Second Chance Bird Dogs and you'll find them there.

Thanks to Mike for spending the day with us and for making bird hunting more fun for many folks right here in Michigan's Out of Doors.

(light guitar music) Well, everybody, we are here with Jim Wood, and we are at the Applewood kitchen and bar area.

Where are we at, Jim?

And kind of where, how long you guys been open here?

- We're in Greenville, Michigan right on 57, just outside of town.

- Okay.

- We've been open for just about six months at this point.

- Okay.

This is our first time here.

So let's just jump right in.

What are we cooking today?

- So I've got some fresh coho, and we're gonna sear it off, and then we're gonna serve it with some corn, jalapeno and tomato relish underneath it.

We're kind of in that- - Okay.

- Perfect part of our grow season here in Michigan, the one that we get.

And then we're gonna make a street corn butter for us.

So kind of all the elements you'd get with Mexican Street corn, and we're gonna integrate 'em into a salmon dish.

- And you said this was coho, but I'm assuming you could use any salmon, obviously, but could you use lake trout too or- - Yeah, I mean, in my opinion, you could really use any fish.

- Okay.

- But I think that a stronger flavor, not that coho is super aggressive, coho's actually very good, but it goes really well with this.

- Okay, well, how do we get started?

Putting everything in a pot?

- Yes, this is gonna be a two-pot dish.

However, this is one of those things that you can make ahead and bring with you for whatever it might be.

Tailgate, deer camp, whatever it might be.

- Okay.

- So we've got just a little bit of oil here, and we're gonna dump our jalapenos and our corn in.

And this is just really quick saute.

A little bit of salt.

- [Jimmy] Now the corn's not cooked or anything yet?

- Nope.

- Okay.

- [Jim] And in all reality, you don't have to cook corn.

But for this dish, it's warm, so it's gonna be cooked no matter what.

- Okay.

- We're only gonna saute it for a couple minutes just to kind of get all that water out.

- And you guys still have wood shop social up in Mount Pleasant?

- Yes, sir.

- All right.

So we'll probably be bouncing back and forth, I would imagine.

- I hope so.

So now that we've kind of cooked that down a little bit.

We're just gonna add some tomatoes, get those a little bit of salt.

We're not really looking to cook these per se.

- Okay.

- Just kind of soften 'em up, release a little bit of water out of 'em.

Now, we're gonna work on our salmon.

So while that's cooking, we're gonna add the other elements to the street corn butter, if you will, which is cilantro.

- [Jimmy] Okay.

- And this is a mix of Chipotle powder and smoked paprika that's gonna give it that smoky element that we're looking for.

It's a little bit of sour cream.

Some salt.

And since there's always some sort of cheese element to a street corn, we're gonna use some parm.

It's a hard cheese.

It's got a good salty element to it.

And then we're gonna do some lime zest here.

- [Jimmy] So that's gonna go on top of the fish, and this is gonna be underneath?

- Yes, sir.

- Okay.

- [Jim] So the butter's essentially a sauce.

- [Jimmy] And what is the name of this dish?

- [Jim] We're gonna call it Salmon with Mexican Street Corn Butter and a Corn and Tomato Relish.

- [Jimmy] Hmm, sounds good.

- [Jim] I hope so.

(bright guitar music) - Thanks for joining us this week for "Michigan Out of Outdoors."

Make sure you come back in upcoming weeks, because we have a lot of great things headed your way.

We'll give you an update on how archery deer season is going so far.

We'll take you out for some waterfall hunting and all sorts of things in between.

If you'd like to check us out on a daily basis and see what we're up to and what we have planned, you can always do that online.

- Well, that's right, online is a good way to see what we're up to on a day-to-day basis.

Probably Instagram and Facebook are the best two ways for that.

And we are out doing a lot of stuff around the state of Michigan right now.

So make sure you are joining us over the next several weeks and make sure you are getting out and enjoying everything our state has to offer.

We'll see you right back here next week on your PBS station.

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(light music)