- Well, hey everybody.

Welcome to "Michigan Out of Doors" and thank you so much for joining us this week.

Hopefully you're getting to spend some good quality time with friends and family around the 4th of July weekend.

What a great time to be a sportsman here in the state of Michigan.

There's so much happening around the state, so get out and enjoy it over this weekend if you get a chance.

We are excited over the next couple of weeks to be bringing you some stories from the Keweena Peninsula.

We just spent several days up in that part of the state.

And on this week's show, since we kind of have the Upper Peninsula on our mind, we're actually gonna go to the east end of the Upper Peninsula on this week's episode to show you some great bass fishing opportunities around the Les Cheneaux Islands.

Really fun place in our state.

If you haven't been there in a while, definitely would recommend that part of the Upper Peninsula as well.

Make sure you stay tuned.

We've got a lot of great stuff for you.

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 ♪ - What a beautiful day in the woods.

♪ Someday our children all we'll see ♪ ♪ This is their finest legacy ♪ ♪ wonder and the love of Michigan ♪ ♪ As the wind comes whispering through the trees ♪ (duck calling) ♪ the sweet 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.

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(upbeat music) (mellow music) - All right, here we go.

Ready to rock.

(mellow music) - [Jimmy] The east end of the UP is one of my favorite spots.

And when Alex Lemon told me he was gonna be fishing Les Cheneaux Islands off of Cedarville for roughly a week leading up to a bass fishing tournament.

Well, you know what, Jordan and I, were gonna be in the area, so we stopped by to follow him and a buddy for an evening of bass fishing.

And what did we get there?

- So this is a half ounce tungsten bullet weight rigged up with a gorilla craw from Silverback Outdoors and Chasing Tail base.

They're one of our sponsors and it's a business that me and a buddy of mine had worked with and we got it up and going during COVID and it took us a little bit to kind of get everything figured out, but once we ended up, whoa.

Once we ended up getting our stuff figured out, it was, it didn't take us long to start getting into stores.

Our very first store was up at Catfisher Bait and Tackle in Sheboygan and they got in with us and they sell our stuff there.

We also sell our stuff online as well.

We make custom soft plastics.

This is a color that we ended up calling the Dark Assassin after last year.

It's just a like, kinda like a brown with red and purple and gold flake in it.

And last year that color alone ended up catching me a 20 pounds small mouth.

So I was pretty tickled about it.

- [Jimmy] Kind of working that through the weeds here?

- Yeah, so basically I'm just making short little pitches and really working it through that grass, just kind of picking it up and dropping it.

They were tucked up inside of the weeds a little bit.

The pencil reeds, they were tucked up inside of them.

(water splashing) He's just a little dude.

- [Jimmy] Oh that's nice fish.

Let see him over here a little bit.

Nice, well that didn't take long at all.

- [Alex] Nope.

- [Jimmy] Let's see him here.

Yeah, that's a good fish.

- Yeah, the fish up here, they got really good color to 'em.

The small mouth sometimes when you get into some of those small mouth and they're just jet black and they're really pretty fish.

- Thanks for playing buddy.

- Hey, hey, hey.

- [Alex] All right, now let's find your bigger brother.

- [Jimmy] Let's see what that was.

That same bait, right?

- [Alex] Yep, yep, yep, that half ounce.

I got it rigged up on 65 pound braid.

- 65, wow.

- I got another rod down here.

It's got 85 on it.

- [Jimmy] So you're gonna, you can pull 'em through about any weeds you want.

- Yeah, yeah, and I'm using a Abu Garcia Silver Max reel.

It's just a regular six bearing reel.

You know, it's not a really, not a really high speed gear ratio reel, but it's got the torque for lifting 'em out and that's what I really like.

- [Jimmy] Alex and his buddy Will are part of the Great Northwest Bass Anglers Club and we're here for a big two day tournament the upcoming Saturday and Sunday.

- So this weekend we ended up having our classic.

This year we're having our classic this year up in Cedarville on the Les Cheneaux Island chain.

And it is, it's just truly beautiful up here.

You know, we got, I'm not really sure on how many boaters we got right now, but we're expecting it to, we're expecting the fishing to start picking up.

It has been tough.

The classic is our biggest tournament of the year, other than our open, which we host on Lake Charlevoix every year.

And that one is a tournament to where anybody can fish.

And we normally host that in June, so it can be a bed fishing tournament.

But our classic is the one, it's a two day tournament, it's back to back days.

It's a five fish limit for both days and it's your biggest combined weight after the two days of fishing.

So we do have a big bass.

So if we do place out the, I do believe we are going with the top three this year.

So it's, the classic is something that all of us strive for at the end of the year to do really well.

And we try to have it on a really good fishery.

You know, the Les Cheneaux Island chain has done us really good in the past years.

Last year we had multiple six pound small mouth.

We had one six pound large mouth come in and we had quite a few bags over the 20 pound mark.

I know last year our classic champion, he ended up coming in with, I do believe it was a 20 or 21 pound bag for his five biggest small mouth.

And they were all small mouth, but like I said, we had guys, we had one club member, Paul Janowski, he broke his personal best small mouth twice in two days.

So, that's pretty awesome to be able to come to a place and have that opportunity to catch such good quality fish.

And Les Cheneaux Islands, you know, you can really go anywhere and just put the hammer down.

But with it being such a big body of water, it gives everybody kind of that sense of freedom.

You really don't have to worry about running into a whole lot of people.

Yeah, you have your locals, but as far as being able to run into our, you know, another guy that you're competing against, we try to keep it on a body of water that you're gonna have that sense of freedom to where you're gonna be able to go anywhere and being able to catch fish.

So with the classic this year it's, we're really anticipating a lot better outcome than what we have had.

So I know it's, this week has been a little tough.

We've had some, it's a little bit warmer than what it was last year.

Hopefully the fishing will start picking up and these guys are, these guys in this club, they're very good and I have no doubt that somebody within this club is gonna find them.

And when they do it's gonna be, it's gonna be impressive.

- We have five scheduled tournaments throughout the year.

Our club puts on one open every year.

The first Saturday in June.

We fish Lake Charlevoix.

Anyone is free to join that tournament.

And then we have five scheduled tournaments.

Only club members can fish.

You can bring a guest if you'd like.

And then at the end of the year we close out with the classic and that's a two day event.

- Is that always up here?

- Nope.

So we have a little rule that the president gets to pick where the classic is.

It's his decision and it's kind of random.

He announces that every year when we pick our schedule and nobody really knows where it's gonna be.

And we fished it last year and everyone liked it.

So he chose to to keep it up here again this year.

- [Jimmy] If you're not familiar with the Les Cheneaux Islands, it's just a breathtaking part of our state.

Basically it's a bunch of islands, many of which have everything from your basic cottage to full on gigantic, spacious mansions and everything in between.

Endless amounts of places to tuck away and fish, which is great and can be frustrating when trying to find fish and consistent fish at that.

Will and Alex were both trying to find a depth, a color, a tactic that might work on the days of the tournament.

Jordan was off to follow some perch fishermen further north.

And I opted for one more morning with Alex and good thing I did because we hit him early and often.

(water splashing) - There we go.

Come here, there we go.

- [Jimmy] Whoa, I'll take that any day of the week.

- Ah, he wasn't going anywhere.

- [Jimmy] Nice fish, dude.

What does that one weigh?

- [Alex] That one?

- [Jimmy] Well we gave it another shot this morning and so far so good.

- Three pounds even.

- Look at that.

The TV guy knew it was a three pounder.

- [Alex] Not a bad one.

- Nice job.

- There we go.

All right.

Gonna come back up and say hello again?

(water splashing) Yep.

- Woo-hoo.

- All right.

Hey.

- In the fog.

- Finally.

- [Jimmy] Morning before the tournament.

So you're getting a plan put together for the next couple of days here, Alex.

What are you thinking?

- Well I think I'm gonna add a frog into the arsenal.

(both laughing) - [Jimmy] Bass fishing tournaments around the state have become a huge deal and happened on just about every body of water and folks love 'em.

- [Alex] Big learning curve for me.

But over the years it's started to become a little bit easier.

You do have your days where you know, they sometimes they just don't work for you and everybody struggles sometimes, you know, that's why they call it fishing.

But it is something that just kind of fills that competitive side of me.

And a lot of guys here in the club, they're very competitive.

They're very, very, very, very good at what they do.

And everybody's got their own techniques and everybody's got their own way of doing things and you know, they got their own way of finding fish and it's very humbling being around a group of guys that love the sport as much as I do.

(both laughing) Oh man.

All right, where the hook's at right there.

And he hit it right there by the boat.

- Yeah he did.

Oh the frog is coming through in the clutch.

- [Alex] Thank you.

- Every trip to the up is always great and if you're looking for another reason to go north, put chasing bass around the Les Cheneaux Islands on your list.

It's worth the drive.

The two day tournament had about 20 some boats and our man Alex, well he ended up taking fourth.

Not bad at all.

One of the younger guys, Paxton Geim took first and he did fine.

Some big smallies.

The amount of bass tournaments keeps growing here in our state.

And good luck to the Great Northwest bass anglers.

We hope that you keep going strong and find some new anglers.

You sure have some of the best northern lakes to choose from.

Thanks for letting us tag along for a few days here in Michigan's Out of Doors.

Well as you can see, we had a ton of fun there in the Les Cheneaux Islands and what we're gonna do is kind of stay right in that same part of the state.

And Jordan Brown is gonna tag along with a couple of his buddies that were up there doing a little fishing for fun.

And to make it a little bit trickier they tried it with a fly rod.

(upbeat music) - [Jordan] For this week's show, I was in one of my favorite spots in the entire state, the eastern UP.

Just outside of the town of Cedarville, where I'd be tagging along with good friends of the show, Jeff and Greg Lipple for a day of bass fishing.

Our trip started with a quick lunch at a restaurant just off of the water and afterwards we headed out hoping to catch a few fish.

(upbeat music) - Man, he's like that thing barely hit the water.

It's smokin'.

- It looks like you cast and hit it.

Is the way scrappier than what I expected a bass of etcetera size to be.

Look at that, what have you.

Look you there.

- I'll get a release shot too with that.

- We are in Cedarville Les Cheneaux Islands area doing some fly fishing for Smallies and large mouth.

That's kind of the plan.

At least we'll take whatever hits, but that's the game plan.

We got one on the board.

We go from there.

- How's the fishing been as of late?

- It's been good for all our may flies and everything else.

The bass fishing has stayed pretty consistent.

Good enough and good to have enough to have fun on a fly rod for sure.

That's working.

Oh here he is.

- Nice.

- A little better one.

Dang, this sucker was fired up.

How many times did he do that?

(reel creaking) Fired up man.

Getting back on the reel.

A little better one.

- [Jordan] We started catching fish almost immediately and as we drifted along I asked Greg to explain his setup for targeting bass this time of year.

Ate something off the surface?

- Mm, pretty straightforward.

Weight, weight forward floating line is what I like most of the time and I like using really small stuff.

Kind of my thought on that is, and I'm not even very particular on what type of fly, it kind of depends.

This time of year when the May flies and stuff are hatching, I like using something brown or orange.

It doesn't seem to matter a whole lot but as long as it's smaller than a standard lure they're seeing, every morning and every afternoon seems to be pretty darn effective as it has been today.

Got 'em, sweet.

Still not a huge one but it's a little better.

Kind of seems like we, they're still like, I dunno, it's fully a post bomb but there's definitely still a lot of fish on beds and defending their beds.

So there's definitely still in it right now for sure.

There's a lot of fish that have already moved off and there's, it seems like there's mostly small fish now, but kind of still seems like they're sort of still doing their thing for this time of year in this part of the state.

Right around the pike opener, May 15th for here, is like you can get a ton of the pre spawn, you know like 10, 20 fish days, a big fish eating crank baits and stick baits like you do, you know most other places, jerk baits.

And then it kind of progresses into, you get closer to June and they all move on to the beds.

And again, like I was saying, there's so much different water here.

You'll get fish that are pre spawn, post spawn, middle of spawn, kind of all at the same, within the same week in this whole area, just depending on where the relation is to the big lake and the water temperatures and everything else.

But there's kind of, you know, long period that you can have a lot of different good techniques for 'em.

Probably the best one we've had so far.

Yeah, he didn't slow down at once.

He was fighting good the whole way in.

- [Jordan] This part of the state is home to a very diverse fishery where you can catch several different species of fish in a relatively small area.

And that's one of the reasons why these two love to fish here.

- There's just a whole lot of different opportunities.

If you wanna get back in bays, real shallow stuff like reeds.

You can go into some deeper areas with real cold water.

And you got all sorts of different species.

So if you look on a map where we're at is north end of Lake Huron.

So whether you wanna just go on the other side of the island here, be fishing over a hundred feet of water, lake trout, salmon, steelhead, or you wanna come in on side of these bays and channels and fish, five feet of water, 20 feet of water, 15, you got a great variety.

Weed beds, reeds, rocky points, sandy areas.

There's just a huge variety 'cause there's a mix of islands that break up this northern end of Lake Huron providing it spots like inland Lakes.

And it's just kind of endlessly, you know, maybe four miles.

You can just kind of continue to go in one bay over, one channel over, depending on what you're looking into.

If you wanna target something like pike, all sorts of great pike spots.

If you wanna target bass, or if you just wanna get out there and have fun and just cast some lures or put a worm and bobber and get into perch and pan fish.

There's just fish throughout here so it's a fun area to explore.

It's a little bit harder to figure out than maybe some regular inland waters, but just a lot of opportunity and almost endless water.

'Cause you're really fishing Lake Heron, just broken up by a series of islands.

Yeah, so it's cool.

We've got real clear water back here.

There's a little bit of a ripple on the water, but you can see enough just to pick out the dark beds.

And Greg had spotted a nice bass sitting on a bed, so we started casting over towards it.

And there's enough ripple where I couldn't really see my lure, but we could see it darting around and know that it was real interested.

So just a few cast and there was just enough of 'em where he finally got fed up and hit it hard and put on a nice fight.

So it's fun when you get to see 'em and kind of hunt around for 'em like this.

Got him.

- Got 'em?

- Yep.

- Yes you do got him.

- He's angry.

- Crazy, crazy, crazy.

Oh yeah, heck yeah.

It looks like a nice one.

Stand down, running back and forth, pulling.

- [Greg] Maybe get us outta these reeds 'cause I don't want that to happen.

- There he is out.

There we go.

Crazy.

Mm.

Okay.

Nice net.

- Another better one.

Probably our best one right there.

- Well, it was just another one that was super aggressive, but it was fun.

Greg spotted it.

We're back in this bay where it's pretty sandy, so those dark beds stand out and then you just start casting to 'em and see if you start seeing anything moving.

And sure enough, we spotted a bass and he's cruising around.

- Yeah, that sucker was eating.

- And the nice thing with that one is it seemed like it spooked out.

Like we were a little worried about how close we were getting, but it almost like it was spook out and come right back in that bed, right?

Or almost instantly it spook out and you'd cast in the dart right at the lure.

So it took me a few casts to get 'em to commit.

Actually one time it hit it really hard and pretty much pulled the tail off my lure.

So we knew it was aggressive.

It was just a matter of getting a good hook set on it and finally hooked up with it and fought good and pulled hard and it was a lot of fun to land.

Made it happen.

Fired up.

Little cutie there.

I don't know how many we've caught this size.

Numerous.

He's still stinking feisty though.

- That was good.

- That was sweet.

We almost had a double.

- Been consistent.

We haven't had any slow spots.

This one's been fun about it too.

The best is you just keep on moving until you find 'em.

So it's not like right all the fishing's really slow or really good or bad.

It's just like it'll be happening somewhere.

Cruising around, finding out where they're hanging out.

- [Jordan] We caught fish pretty much everywhere we went, making for a great day on the water in a beautiful corner of our state.

Special thanks to Greg and Jeff for letting me tag along on a fun day of fishing here in the UP.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - Well everybody, thank you so much for watching "Michigan Out of Doors" this week.

If you wanna see something again or maybe you missed last week's show, you can always check us out online at Michiganoutofdoorstv.com.

We have full episodes there and actually we recently revamped our entire website.

Looks completely different, much more easy to navigate.

You can look at old recipes if you want to, check out some of those.

And you can actually check out a new merchandise section as well.

So lots of new Michigan Out of Doors gear, if you wanna check that out.

Should be more stuff coming on that site over the next couple weeks as well.

So make sure you're checking in and checking in often and make sure that you are joining us over the next couple of weeks.

Like I mentioned, we have the stuff from the Upper Peninsula that we just filmed.

We're gonna be sitting down with a DNR and talking about wolves and cougars and a cool trail camp study they have going on in the Upper Peninsula.

We're gonna sit down with a UP resident and talk a little bit about some of the deer regulation changes for this upcoming year when it comes to the Upper Peninsula.

So lots happening here on "Michigan Out of Doors TV" and hopefully if we don't see it in the woods or on the water, we'll see you right back here next week on your "PBS" station.

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Closed captioning, brought to you by DD Ranch Foundation, a nonprofit 501C3 foundation working to make hunting and fishing accessible for those with disabilities.

(upbeat music) ♪ When I want far away ♪ ♪ a dream stays with me day ♪ ♪ It's the road that leads to my home state ♪ ♪ I am a Michigan man ♪ ♪ changing seasons paint the scene ♪ ♪ like rainbow trout in a hidden stream ♪ ♪ The whitetail deer in the tall pine trees ♪ ♪ I am a Michigan man ♪ ♪ I am, I am a Michigan man ♪ ♪ ask where I'm from and I'll show you my hands ♪ ♪ Lord above, I love this land ♪ ♪ I am an Michigan man ♪ ♪ From the Keweena down to St. Joe ♪ (mellow music)