***This article appeared in the Petoskey News Review on June 24, 2009.  Click here to go to the original article on the Petoskey News Review site… Sight-fishing for carp off Beaver Island by George Rowe.

A few years ago, ardent anglers from all over these United States and some foreign places traveled to Beaver Island for the fishing.

The fishing then was the best smallmouth bass fishing on the planet. The cormorants are generally credited for the demise of that fishing and it may be on the rebound despite the every-present cormorants.

Now, however, there is a new star of the islands around Beaver is it is the lowly carp. Steve West, the enthusiastic Chamber of Commerce guy of the island, calls the fish the “Golden Bones of Beaver Island,” comparing the carp of course to the bonefish of Florida and the Bahamas.

And, it isn’t a bad comparison.

This is why one might see in St. James harbor a strange looking skiff with a poling platform at the stern and a long push-pole lashed to the deck. This craft is used to move slowly along the shallow flats, searching for the fish

This fishing is really part hunting. First you find the fish, then you work to get in position for a cast then you try for the fish. The fish is apt to ignore your offering so you go in search of another fish. Fortunately, there are lots of fish so you will get another opportunity shortly.

When I heard about this fishing, I was anxious to try it. As one with a great deal of experience with bonefish in Florida and the Bahamas, it would be very interesting to sample some new flats fishing.

I did some weekend charters while in Florida fishing the upper Keys and visited many locations in the Bahamas for bonefishing. This is some of the finest fishing in the world. The skiff, set up to operate well in shallow water, is poled across the shallow flats, in gin-clear water no more than 15- 20 inches deep. The fish are often spotted “tailing”, showing their tails and dorsal fins as the root around in the soft bottom for crabs, shrimp and other tasty morsels.

You can also spot them just swimming along slowly, cruising and the fact that they are often in small schools helps in seeing them.  Sometimes, you first see a “mud” where the fish have been feeding and stirring up the bottom.

Fishing for the Beaver Island carp is exactly the same, except that the fish are easier to see. The carp are darker and larger, averaging perhaps 15-20 pounds while bonefish rarely get as large as 10 pounds.

Still, it is a good idea to wear polarized sunglasses, especially if the day is cloudy or if there is much of a chop on the water. Last Thursday, the sun was bright for much of the day and Lake Michigan was a placid as a mill pond so it was pretty easy to spot the fish.

The fish congregate in the shallows as soon as the water is nicely warm and this is when they get their spawning done. The best time is apparently from mid-June through August. The best fishing technique is to cast a fly that imitates a crayfish or some other small crustacean. The shrimp flies that are used for bonefish would probably serve just fine. 

When a fish is spotted, the boat handler maneuvers the skiff close enough so that the angler can reach the fish and drop the fly well in front of the fish. When the fish approaches the fly, the angler begins a hopping retrieve, right in front of the fish’s nose.

Hopefully, the fish will turn and pursue the fly, taking it in his mouth.  More often than not, however, the fish will ignore the offering and continue to cruise.

Sometimes, the fish will show some interest by turning after the fly and then turning away again.

Like bonfish, the carp are quite spooky and once they sense your presence, they are no longer catchable – as a matter of fact, they often scoot right out of sight. They don’t seem too sensitive to the waving of the rod or even the little splash when the fly hits the water.

They are very sensitive to sound, however, so if the boat handler makes too much noise with the pole or if a wader makes much noise with his feet, they will spook away quickly.

The tackle we used was sturdy fly-fishing gear – an eight-weight rod with a matching weight-forward or torpedo floating line. The leader was about five feet of 10-pound-test mono. The flies were large, mostly multi-colored, but dark and most were weighted slightly. One can expect to make a good cast to many a fish before hooking up.

Our guide says they are really poor predators and not very effective in chasing down prey. Apparently their vision is not great. When you do hook up, it is set the hook and hang on.

These fish will make great long runs and yet another long run after you battle them back to the boat. They are very large, of course, very strong and they have terrific stamina. The reels the guide uses are large with a good drag and there is ample backing behind the fly line and you will see it on virtually every fish. The fight is similar to that of a bonefish but more dogged.

The bonefish is all run and little else. The carp is run, run again and get sideways and resist all the way back to the boat. They are truly great fun to catch. Some of the reward is the setting – way back in some remote bay by Hog Island all by yourself in a pristine wilderness surrounded by crystal-clear water.

The cormorants are still very much in evidence, despite serious efforts to limit their impact on the area. They have created absolutely barren rocky ruins on some of the smaller islands where they have roosted, killing all the trees and other foliage with their droppings.

The new import — the goby — may have a good impact on the fishing.  The cormorants eat them and thus maybe eat fewer bass fry. The goby is also bass food.

The smallmouth bass fishery has apparently recovered somewhat – there is once again an open season for them, starting July 1 and you could sight-fish for them just as we did for carp. We spotted many smallmouths, including a few tagged fish, probably tagged by the CMU research vessel operating in the area. Until the smallmouth bass fishery has fully recovered, it might make sense to make the season for them all catch and release.

 If you want to try this fishing, contact Kevin Morlock who operates the Indigo Gide Service out of Walhalla. He also runs trout and salmon fishing charters on the major rivers that feed Lake Michigan, but he is on Beaver Island through August.

He is largely booked, but he may have a few days left in August. He is pleasant, competent, a willing teacher and very well equipped in every respect. Contact him at (231) 898-4320 or .  We stayed comfortably at the Erin Motel right downtown on the water and just a short walk from the ferry dock and some good restaurants.

Want to try sight-fishing for big, powerful fish in a beautiful setting?  Try those Beaver Island “golden bones."

Other Links:  Petoskey News Review, Sight-fishing for carp off Beaver Island by George Rowe (Petoskey News Review), Beaver Island Chamber of Commerce, Brandon Butler of Driftwood Outdoors, Central Michigan University – Beaver Island Biological Research Station, Kevin Morlock of Indigo Guide Service, Erin Motel of Beaver Island, Beaver Island Boat Company, Round Goby – Fish of the Great Lakes by University of Wisconsin Sea Grant, Kevin Morlock’s carp flies.

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This article "The Carp of Beaver Island" by Brandon Butler appeared in Midwest Fly Fishing in the October 2008 issue.  Midwest Fly Fishing is a great regional publication, you can check out their web site at… Midwest Fly Fishing (www.mwfly.com).

The Carp of Beaver Island

Brandon Butler with a carp hooked on the flats near Beaver Island.      photo/ Kevin Morlock

     Walking up the ramp of the Emerald Isle for the trip from Charlevoix, Mich., to Lake Michgian’s Beaver Island, anticipation gave way to acceptance.  Month after month had been crossed off my calendar as I awaited the arrival of the 4th of July expedition.
     In the back of my mind, I had questioned the rational if driving more than 500 miles to fly fish for carp — after all, they’re the same fish that swim a stone’s throw from my home in Indiana.  But I had been told by a trusted guide that the experience would be one I would never forget.  So as the ship’s engines began to rumble, I settled back to see what would happen.
     After the two-hour, 32-mile ferry ride to the tiny town of St. James on the island, it was clear that the experience I would never forget would be an adventure, as well.  The island is about 13 miles long and 6 miles wide, about 54 square miles in area.  A weathered, old lighthouse greets travelers to the island, and the harbor moors only a handful of boats.  In the marina parking lot, friends and family awaited the Isle’s arrival.  My guide-to-be, Kevin Morlock, was among them.
     Kevin is a well-known salmon and steelhead guide on the rivers of western Michigan.  When we met a few years back, the crossing of kindred souls was obvious.  In the years since, we have fished together numerous times.
     After a quick tour of Main Street in St. James, we headed to the campground where Kevin stayed for the summer.  It was located on a high bluff, overlooking the waters of Lake Michigan.  The horizon was dotted with the uninhabited islands of Trout, Whiskey, Garden and Hog.  From this vantage point, Kevin, while taking his morning coffee, could scout carp feeding on the sand flats below.  For the sake of simplicity, I had left my tent at home and rigged a hammock between two trees where the wind would rock me and the waves would serenade at the end of a hard day’s night.
     I’m not a morning person, so when Kevin told me carp fishing improves as the day progresses, I was pleased.  We shuffled around our camp the first morning and discussed strategy while waiting for the sun to warm the water.
     Kevin fishes from a flats boat, 17 feet long with a 40-horse motor.  It had a platform in back from which he could pole us toward carp without a sound.
     Like most of us who have Champaign dreams and beer budgets, I have longed for but have never been able to afford saltwater adventures.  The idea of a steelheading maestro, perched atop a platform, pushing me around in search of tailing carp in the northern most reaches of America, was inspiring.
     We launched the boat off the eastern shore of the island and headed for the southern tip.  The water temperatures we took on the main lake were in the low 60s; too cold for aggressive carp.  Kevin expected the water would be warmer in the south bays, inviting pods of carp to gather in the shallow water.
     I never thought this trip would change my perception of a species I knew so little about, but as we watched carp after carp cruising the outer lip of the flats, i found them irresistible.  Back home in Indiana, people shoot carp with bow and arrow and trow their carcasses away.  Seeing these finicky, beautiful beasts cruising crystal-clear water in search of food is something else.
     We moored the boat in a few feet of water and began to approach the shallows where the fish were feeding.  The water temperature here was 70 degrees, perfect for feeding fish.
     Kevin was on a mission this summer to catch as many carp as he could because he is tagging caught fish to track their movements in Lake Michigan.  A biologist at heart, he enjoys the science of the experience as much as the catching.  I left him to his own pod and set out down the beach in search of more fish.  They weren’t hard to locate, and a group of feeding fish appeared before me as a dark streak across the clear water.
     I slipped up behind a large bolder 50 feet or so from a pod of a half-dozen carp.  Kevin had warned me to get the fly close to the feeding fish, into an area as wide as a basketball hoop.  Their eyesight, he said, is poor and they rarely chase flies aggressively.
     Seeing so many carp around me, I figured these fish would be easy to catch, but they are not.  I worked this little pod for nearly and hour, before finally, a fish took.  The moment is still fresh in my mind.  I was growing anxiously annoyed, when I targeted a carp on the outskirts of the pod.  The cast was a few feet beyond the fish, perfect for allowing my goby imitation time to sink the necessary two feet.  As I strip-stripped the minnow along the bottom, allowing for a pause just in front of the fish’s face, I watched with amazement as its bugle-mouth opened and inhaled my fly.  Somehow I kept my excitement in check and executed a solid hook set.  The fight was on.
     As the thirty-inch fish ran for deep water, I slightly tightened my drag.  We struggled back and forth for 15 minutes before I finally brought the magnificent fish to hand.  In awe, I caressed the sided of the fish and released it with a new-found respect for such a maligned species.
     Fatigued suddenly and pensive, I crawled onto a nearby boulder and listened to the sounds of waves breaking on the shoreline of Beaver Island and the wind from the great lake around me.

Brandon Butler is a syndicated outdoor writer from Bloomington, Ind.  Contact him through his website www.driftwoodoutdoors.org.

Beaver Island Chamber of Commerce web site…

The article "It’s clear:  Underrated carp offers game-fishing challenge" by Eric Sharp appeared in the Detroit Free Press on July 24th, 2008.

It’s clear:  Underrated carp offers game-fishing challenge

     Beaver Island — If you showed a picture of this place to an experienced saltwater angler, he’d almost certainly say it was taken in the Florida Keys or somewhere else in the tropics.
     On a virtually windless day, the surface was flat and the water so clear that every pebble was visible on the bottom 20 feet below.
     And as Kevin Morlock eased his skiff onto a shallow flat where the water was about three feet deep, we saw a couple of long, dark shapes that moved over the bottom while the black

shadows cast by underwater rocks stayed still.
     The moving shapes were good-sized examples of America’s most underrated game fish, a species that lends itself to stalking and sight fishing just like stalking bones in the Keys — the noble carp.
     There probably is no place in world better suited to this kind of fishing than northern lakes Michigan and Huron.  And the Beaver Island archipelago, a cluster of islands 10-30 miles off the northwest tip of the Lower Peninsula, may well offer the best of the best.
     "The conditions really look good," fishing guide Kevin Morlock said as we ran across Lake Michigan toward a flat on the south side of Garden Island about three miles from Beaver Island’s St. James Harbor.  "This is the lightest wind we’ve had for weeks.  Most of this summer, the seas have been running three or four feet."
     Sight fishing on clear, shallow flats requires accurate casting whether the target is carp, bonefish, tarpon or redfish.  For carp and bonefish, the key is placing the fly or jig close enough to the fish’s heads that they can see it but far enough away that it doesn’t spook them.
     "A lot of anglers don’t understand that casting to these fish isn’t like casting to a trout or salmon and letting the fly drift down to it.  If you don’t put the fly in the teacup, you don’t have much chance of getting a take," said Morlock, who owns Indigo Guide Service on the Pere Marquette River out of Walhalla, fishing that river from the start of the mid-August salmon run through the steelhead runs in winter and spring.
     The more sight casting you do, the better you get.  I had made only one previous sight-casting trip this summer, mostly because the weather has been unsuitable, so I bungled some casts and scared off fish.
     But I also made a number of very good casts only to see the carp ignore flies that passed within inches of their eyes.
     "This is what I ran into a couple of days ago," Morlock said.  "I kept changing flies, but they wouldn’t take anything we offered."
     Morlock agreed with my observation that carp cruising along in a straight line at high speed will rarely turn to investigate a lure.  It’s obvious that they’re on a mission and won’t be sidetracked.
     So we were both surprised a little later when I made a Hail Mary cast at a carp cruising by at six knots and the fish stopped on a dime, turned and began following the fly.  The carp was almost touching the crayfish pattern with its nose, and while it followed the lure for 40 feet, it wouldn’t bite and turned off as soon as it saw the boat.
     "I think what happens is that when we get wind changes like we’ve had for the past couple of days, it takes the fish some time to settle down to a new (feeding) pattern,"  Morlock said.  "I like to see the wind come steadily out of one direction for a couple of days.  When we get that, I know where to find them, and they seem to feed a lot more eagerly."
     British anglers have a mantra:  Follow the wind.  They look for bays and points where the wind concentrates food.  Morlock is also so an adherent of that theory and said, "You want to find the gnarliest points and fish around them.  In summer, that’s where the currents pile up the warmest water."
     Morlock’s average day:  dozens or even hundreds of fish sighted, 12-15 hooked up and five-10 landed and released.
     This day was one of the few when the fish were widely scattered and wouldn’t touch anything we offered.  But it was far from a total loss because we got to experience one of the most exceptional fishing experiences that Michigan offers, in a place that few people realize exists.
     Most people who visit the islands arrive aboard a Beaver Island Boat co. ferry that makes the 33-mile trip from Charlevoix in about two hours ($46 round-trip).  Another option is a 20-minute flight on Island Airways ($86 round-trip).  The ferry also carries cars and boat trailers.

Beaver Island Chamber of Commerce
Beaver Island Boat Company
Island Airways
Fresh Air Aviation