- Well, hey everybody.

Welcome to "Michigan Out of Doors."

Thank you so much for joining us this week.

We have a brand new show, but we do have a shortened show this week because our PBS stations are in pledge.

But we are gonna kick things off on this week's episode by showing you how to catch smelt through the ice on Gull Lake.

I tell you what, you won't wanna miss that, and we're gonna have a really good fish recipe to go along with that story as well.

So make sure to stay tuned.

I'm Jimmy Gretzinger.

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" ♪ - [Speaker] What a beautiful day in the woods.

♪ Someday our children all will see ♪ ♪ This is their finest legacy ♪ The wonder and the love of Michigan ♪ ♪ As the wind comes whispering through the trees ♪ ♪ The weed smell of nature's in the air ♪ ♪ From the great lakes to the quiet stream ♪ ♪ Shine like a sportsman's dream ♪ ♪ It's a love of Michigan we all share ♪ - [Announcer] "Michigan Out of Doors" is presented by: By Country Smokehouse.

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(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Jay's Sporting Goods.

Trust the tradition.

(gentle upbeat music) - A couple weeks ago I headed down to Gull Lake, just northwest of Battle Creek to join some diehard smelt fishermen, Phil Sitar, and his son, Tom, out on the ice.

All right, so the green light attracts the zooplankton in in the water and the lake, and what happens is it kind of triggers their feed.

The smelt come in, they school up, and they'll fill up on that plankton and hopefully they'll hit our flies at the same time before they get off, you know, full and done eating.

Yeah, we encourage people to spread out, you know, 150 yards apart because if you have a bunch of people all in the same small area, those fish will just swirl.

They don't stop and stay in one spot.

People don't catch as many fish.

- [Speaker] So if you spread out, it'll help everybody.

- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

That's what we found, 100%.

- Gull Lake is, as far as I know, the only lake in southern Michigan that has smelt in it.

The next closest lakes are like Higgins, Green, Torch.

So you gotta go on a little hike.

So it's a very unique lake.

We are very blessed to have this gem down here.

Just sitting out here trying to, you know, setting up for smelt.

The smelt tend to like this deeper water.

Certain lakes, a lot of guys will fish for 'em 30-40 feet.

Gull, they seem to school up better in the deeper water.

Guys will be fishing out here anywhere from 60 foot out to a hundred foot tonight.

The smelt, hopefully, they'll show up right around dark or shortly thereafter.

- So we take all of the ice shavings, snow, if there's any in the shanny, and we put it in the corner so we can actually see the bites.

It gives us contrast against our rod tips so we can see the bites a little bit better.

The light actually helps a lot too.

That's why we've got lights down on the side of the milk crate to give us that little bit of added emphasis on the bite.

- Watch this.

I winded up when I see my swivel coming up.

I lift up and out and it was the first one of the night.

Pretty small one, but... - [Jim] And just like that the smelt showed up.

The graph went from being empty to almost 40 feet of solid fish in about 15 minutes.

The guys were fishing with Phil's hand-tied smelt flies.

These ones were size 16, much smaller than your typical teardrop.

- So tonight I've got red and white spikes.

I've got a couple different colors, pink and white, and orange and white.

On the very bottom I have a tungsten gray and white glow, which is known as a smelt-buster fly.

And I am just going to stack these white-red, white-red, white-red.

There's nothing specific about how you hook 'em, just right through the center.

- [Speaker] Double.

- There you go.

- We'll take that.

And you'll see me do something here in a second.

The way I keep track of my doubles is I'll throw one on the ice.

Every time I get a double, I'll throw one in that pile.

(laughing) That's how I know many doubles I have at the end of the night.

- [Jim] Gull Lake is an incredible smelt fishery and it's amazing to see all the fish show up to the green lights once the sun goes down.

(gentle upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music continues) (gentle upbeat music continues) (people chattering indistinctly) - Usually when they hit it hard like that, you don't get 'em.

I got lucky on that one.

(gentle upbeat music continues) Okay.

(chuckling) - Some people will count it like one, two, three, as their jig is dropping and when it gets full on the graph, then you know just about how far down you are.

So I'll just put my swivel at basically the ice or even my rod tip and I'll go one, two, three.

That tells me that I'm down right around 18 to 20 feet 'cause it's roughly about six foot.

And then I can make adjustments dependent on the depth of the water, where the fish are, or if I have to go deeper, then I might start counting.

- [Speaker] It's all because the graph is so loaded with fish, you can't see your bait going down.

- Correct.

Yep.

When it gets fully loaded, you don't know where you're at.

- [Angler] Yeah, where we're fishing right now, it's solid red so we don't, you know, we can't see anything.

(gentle upbeat music continues) (gentle upbeat music continues) - What do you know, I'm the KB special?

Huh?

I wonder why.

(chuckling) (gentle music continues) I think I know what this is.

I might be wrong.

(indistinct) Probably a double.

There you go.

(gentle upbeat music continues) What I wanted to show everybody, if you're thinking about wanting to try a long rod for smelt fishing, this is a 48 inch Ice Blue and these are really good for smelt fishing.

I call 'em an entry level long fish pole for smelt.

But they worked really good.

In fact, I've had one person out-fish me one night.

He was a newbie and he out-fished me with one of these rods.

- [Speaker] Why the long rods, Phil?

- Okay, there's a couple different reasons.

We can get all six hooks on one rod.

We get better hookups on these long rods with the, it just seems to hook fish better, hook more fish with 'em.

The bites show up really good.

The problem with fish in two rods with like three hooks on each rod, if you're in a hot bite, you're chasing bites and you're missing a lot of fish doing that.

If you have one rod that you're paying attention to, keeping it in your hands, you catch a lot more fish.

It just, there's several reasons for the long rod.

You know, I really, even if somebody doesn't want to use a long rod, I just tell 'em, use one rod.

You'll catch more fish.

Here's another thing I'm doing.

It's called, we call it tapping.

A lot of times that'll trigger a bite.

- [Jim] As you can see, there's a lot of little details to smelt fishing.

Phil spends a lot of time on the ice and online trying to help others be successful.

He runs a Facebook group dedicated to helping people succeed at smelt fishing on Gull Lake.

- If somebody comes out fishing with us, especially if they come from a long ways away, I always try to make sure that I got some clean smelt for him, make sure they got something to take home.

- Especially 'cause there's nights where you don't know if they're gonna turn on or not, you can do everything right and you just have a bad night where they just don't show up.

So, you know, all the people that we fish with, especially if they come from a long ways away, we go ahead and we try to get them some smelt so they at least go home with something.

And if we have a good night, they go home with even more.

(rock music) (indistinct) (rock music continues) (rock music continues) Uh-oh.

He swallowed that.

Completely swallowed that hook.

(rock music continues) (rock music continues) - These flies are size 16, which are a lot smaller than what most guys are using.

You know, a lot of guys using regular Ice jigs, a lot of them are size 12.

The regular hooks on a, on most of your Haley jigs are like a number 10 hook.

And it just for these size smelt, you know, you can see, even with me using some number 18s, I'm missing a fair amount of fish tonight.

And so the flies being smaller, not having a big head on 'em, like a lot of ice jigs do, the smelt can get 'em in their mouth better.

And is it, is it, is it, oh- - [Bystander] Yep.

- He got, that was a triple, one got off.

That was a triple.

One got off.

I seen him hit the bottom of the ice.

- My son Remy, he's about to turn three in April.

Hopefully he'll be able to be as addicted as we are.

- I love catching salmon, fishing for salmon out on the big lake.

But I tell you what this, I absolutely love this.

I'm addicted to smelt fishing.

And that's why I love it.

I love the green ice.

The green ice just, I love it.

- [Jim] Final tally for the night was 215 tasty smelt.

Not a bad night on the green ice of Gull Lake.

(gentle upbeat music) - Well, we are here once again, Wood Shop Social, Mount Pleasant, Michigan.

Jim Wood, Chef extraordinaire, Jim, what are we cooking?

What's our wild game of choice today.

- We're gonna make a lake trout chowder or lake trout stew, however you want call it.

- Okay, nice.

And you caught this fish?

- I did.

- [Speaker] Really?

- I actually caught it with my own two hands.

- Well, good for you.

- That's a true story.

It's at least my best version.

- Well, it wasn't a barrel?

- Nope.

- Okay.

- Nope.

- And it was through the ice.

So look at that.

Yeah.

- Okay.

So what do we- - I'm not a one trick pony, Jimmy.

- Well, I dunno about that.

- That's true.

- So some of it looks like it's smoked or somewhat cooked or where are with the fish?

- Yeah, we've got some lightly smoked lake trout and then just some raw lake trout.

- Okay.

- So we're gonna start off with a little bit of oil.

And the only reason we're doing that is because we're adding a whole butter and the whole butter's got a really low smoke point and I don't wanna burn it.

- Gotcha.

- And then we've got some celery, carrot, and onion.

(food sizzling) - This is standby.

- This is pretty much standard in all French cookery.

And we are just gonna let that sweat down for a little while.

- [Jim] Okay.

Not a lot of ingredients here that looks like, - No, there's not actually, pretty simplistic, which is- - Nice.

- Which is good.

All right, so we've cooked this down a decent amount.

We're gonna add a little sherry.

So we like to add a little bit of booze whenever we can.

- Nice.

- We're just gonna let that cook off.

Now, obviously a chowder needs to be thickened, so that's where we add this flour.

- Okay.

- So just all purpose flour.

And we're gonna whisk that in.

- [Jim] Nice.

- So you can use multiple things for the actual stock part.

- Okay.

- Fish stock, we're using clam juice here, which you can just pick up at their local grocery store.

If you want to use chicken stock, you can.

But I'm like, the more seafood flavor, the more fishy flavor, the better for me.

- All right.

Heavy cream next or potatoes next?

- We'll do heavy cream, and then we're gonna add our fresh herbs and then we'll add our potatoes.

- [Jim] Ah.

- Little more salt and pepper.

- And obviously you said this is lake trout, but I'm assuming you could swap in- - You can use it pretty much- - Whitefish, salmon, anything.

- Yeah, whatever you want.

And it doesn't, you know, I smoked some of it.

You don't have to do that.

It just adds another flavor element to it.

- Okay.

- So basically what we're gonna do here is we're gonna bring us up to a simmer slowly.

Once the potatoes are cooked, we're gonna add the fish, let it cook through, and then it's done.

- [Jim] What do we call this dish?

- We're gonna call it egg trout chowder.

- [Jim] Beautiful.

- Sounds good to me.

- [Jim] Very complex.

- Yeah, I mean, it's a big one.

It's a, try to say that three times fast.

- [Jim] All right.

- Yeah, with a little more dill.

And then we make our own focaccia here at Wood Shop, so we're gonna make some focaccia croutons instead of crackers.

Ready?

- Let's do it.

That's good.

- Yeah.

Nice.

- There's a lot of fish.

- There's definitely a lot of fish, and that's the point.

- Very good.

- Wow.

(upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music continues) (gentle upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - Well, hey everybody, thank you so much for watching "Michigan Outdoors" this week.

Thanks to everyone that took part in our big buck nights, east and west.

Those will be coming over the next couple of weeks for you.

So lots of big deer, lots of big stories, so make sure you stay tuned for that and make sure you are getting out and enjoying everything our state has to offer.

And if we don't see in the woods or on the water, hopefully we'll see you right back here next week on your PBS station.

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More information as saabinc.com - [Announcer] By ShowSpan, producing consumer shows that include the "Ultimate Sports Show" in Grand Rapids.

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- [Announcer] Closed captioning brought to you by Double D Ranch Foundation, a nonprofit 501c3 foundation, working to make hunting and fishing accessible for those with disabilities.

(gentle upbeat music continues) ♪ When I wander far away ♪ The dream stays with me night and day ♪ ♪ It's the road that leads to my home state ♪ ♪ I am a Michigan man ♪ Changing seasons paint the scene ♪ ♪ Like rainbow out in a hidden stream ♪ ♪ The whitetail deer in the tall pine trees ♪ ♪ I am a Michigan man ♪ I am a Michigan man ♪ That's where I'm from and I'll show you my hands ♪ ♪ Lord above, I love this land ♪ I am a Michigan man ♪ From Tahquamenon down to St.

Joel ♪ ♪ Kalamas to East Monroe ♪ to St.

Marie and back again ♪ I am a Michigan man ♪ I'm a Michigan man ♪ That's where I'm from and I'll show you my hands ♪ ♪ Lord above, I love this land ♪ I am a Michigan man (gentle chiming music)