Hi Kevin,
 
After you spoke to our fishing Club, Central Ohio Fly Fishers,  this past winter we booked our trip with you to Beaver Island the next day! The clear blue waters reminded us of the Caribbean, and the fishing looked like it was going to be really fun! Everything was “as advertised”! The waters were clear, the fish were huge, and the whole day was a blast! You were a perfect guide, and we look forward to coming back to the very charming, Beaver Island!

Jackie

Kevin,

Just a note to thank you again for the great fishing trip earlier this week.  We saw lots of carp and beautiful secluded islands.  I’m not sure I can get back this summer, but I really want to fish with you again next summer. Thank you especially for your patience in getting Charlie a fish.  With his vision and casting ability it was a challenge.

Thanks again for a great time.

George

Hi Kevin,

Jerry and I really enjoyed our recent time on the waters north of Beaver Island.  The boating of a few nice springtime carp was a real treat… Thanks again for a great fishing experience in Lake Michigan and best regards from Muskegon.

Greg

Michigan Outdoor News, Beaver Island’s fishing bonanza: Sight-fishing for carp 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 — some of the best smallmouth bass fishing on the planet.

Cormorants are generally blamed for the demise of that fishing.  But cormorant control measures have been practiced on the island in recent years and the bass fishery may be on the rebound.  Now, the lowly carp is a new star of the islands.  Steve West, the enthusiastic Chamber of Commerce guru for the island, calls carp 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.  But comparing the fishing to angling for permit off Florida or the Bahamas might be an even better comparison.

Bonefish rarely get to be much heavier than 10 pounds, but the permit grow to enormous sizes and the average fish might be close to the weight of a Beaver Island carp.  The fight in both fish is similar.

This is why one might see in St. James Harbor a strange 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, as those aboard search for fish.

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

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

I ran some weekend charters while living in Florida, fishing the upper Keys, and visited many locations in the Bahamas for bonefish.  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 or 20 inches deep.  The fish often are spotted "tailing," showing their tails and dorsal fins as they root around in the soft bottom for cabs, shrimp, and other tasty morsels.  You also can spot them just swimming along slowly, cruising.  The fact that they’re often in small schools helps in seeing them.  Sometimes, you first see 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.  Carp are darker and larger, averaging perhaps 15 to 20 pounds.

It’s a good idea to wear polarized sunglasses, especially if the day is cloudy or if there’s much of a chop on the water.  When we were out there, the sun was bright for much of the day and Lake Michigan was as placid as a mill pond, so it was pretty easy to spot the fish.

 Carp congregate in the shallows as soon as the water warms enough for spawning.  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.  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 it.

When the fish approaches the fly, the angler begins a hopping retrieve, right in front of the fishes nose in hopes the carp 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 bonefish, carp are easily spooked, and they’re not likely to take any lure.  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’re 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 quickly will swim away.

Gearing up

The tackle we used was sturdy fly-fishing gear — an 8-weight rod with a matching weight-forward or torpedo floating line.  The leader was about 5 feet of 10-pound-test mono.  The flies were large, mostly multi-colored but dark, and most were weighted slightly.

Expect to make good casts to many fish before hooking up.  Our guide said carp are poor predators and not very effective in chasing down prey.  Apparently their vision is not great.  When you do hook up, set the hook and hang on.  These fish will make long initial runs and yet another long run after you battle them back to the boat.  They are 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.  You’ll see it on virtually every fish.  The fight is frantic.  A carp will run, run and run then get sideways and resist all the way back to the boat.  They are great fun to catch.

Some of the reward is the setting — way back in some remote bay by Hog Island, all be yourself, in a pristine wilderness, surrounded by crystal clear water.

The cormorants are still very much evident, 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, killed 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 might eat fewer bass fry.  The goby is also bass food.

The smallmouth bass fishery has apparently recovered somewhat.  There is again an open season for them, starting July 1, and you can sight-fish for them just as we did for carp.

We spotted many smallmouths, including a few fish that had been tagged by CMU researchers aboard a vessel operating in the area.

If you want to try this fishing, contact Kevin Morlock who operates the Indigo Guide Service out of Walhalla.  Comfortable accommodations are available on Beaver Island.

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

FlyMasters of Indianapolis will be hosting a summer carp outing at Beaver Island on July 10th-14th and 14th-18th.  Ian Anderson will be running the event for FlyMasters.  For the last couple years Ian has hosted a number of outings at Barothy Lodge and Beaver Island with Indigo and they are always a success.  Ian has a great attention to detail and puts together a great outing.

Ian has put together a nice page about this outing on the FlyMastyers site, click here for more…

This article by Brandon Butler of Driftwood Outdoors appeared in Eastern Fly Fishing in the January/February 2010 Issue.  This article does a great job of describing what Great Lakes carp and smallmouth bass fishing is like and also describes the islands many qualities very well.

Beaver Island, MI.
Northern Island Angling Paradise

By: Brandon Butler

I will post a copy of the article on the site after their next issue comes out.  For now you can purchase a hard copy or download a free pdf of the issue from their site… click here to download the pdf from their site.

The article "Carp Of Beaver Island… Champagne dreams on a beer budget!" by Brandon Butler (Driftwood Outdoors) appeared in the Woods-N-Water News in July 2009.  You can view the article on the Woods-N-Water News web site here.

 

Carp Of Beaver Island… Champagne dreams on a beer budget!

Settling into my seat on the Emerald Isle, anticipation gave way to acceptance. Month after month had been crossed off my calendar as I awaited the arrival of this 4th of July expedition. In the back of my mind, I slightly questioned driving over 500 miles to fly fish for carp; the same rough fish that swim a stone’s throw from home. But I had been guaranteed by a fisherman I trust too well, that this experience would be one I would never forget. So as the ship’s engines began to rumble I took heart, yearning for the unknown.

As the two-hour, thirty-two mile ferry ride closed in on the tiny town of St. James, I realized all I knew about Great Lake Islands would not summarize this place. Beaver Island’s weathered old lighthouse greets travelers much like a great-grandparent too feeble to rise from his rocking chair, but happy to see you nonetheless. The harbor moors only a handful of boats and the pier at the marina looks as if Roosevelt commissioned the Civilian Conservation Corps to modernize the Island.

Kevin Morlock is a well known salmon and steelhead guide on the rivers of western Michigan. Kevin and I have fished together numerous times, and I have come to respect his wealth of knowledge, but when he told me he was designing a flats fishing boat to target carp around the islands of Michigan’s archipelago, I thought maybe he’d finally spent one two many days in the sun.

Keeping within the boundaries of simplicity I had elected to leave my tent at home in favor of a hammock. Hung between two trees where the wind would rock me to a serenade of waves. My weary fisherman’s body rested well at the end of a hard day’s night.

Carp fishing improves as the day grows warmer. There’s no reason to get up early, leaving plenty of time to lounge about sipping morning coffee. Making for a great start to a relaxing day.

With the sun high in the bluebird sky, Kevin and I launched his boat; a brand new, 17 ft. deep-v, with a 40 horse. The real kicker though, is the rear mounted platform and the twenty foot push pole. Like most of us who harbor champagne dreams on a beer budget, I have longed for the Caribbean since reading my first flats article, but have never come close to saving enough money to go. Diapers and milk, you know. So 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 somewhat of an obscure realization of a dream come true.

We took off from the eastern shore of the island and headed for the southern tip. We wanted to go where the waves would push into small bays. The water temperature reading on the main lake was in the low sixties; a bit too cold for aggressive carp. Kevin knew the water would be warmer in the south bays, causing pods of carp to gather in the shallow water. I never anticipated this trip would change my perception of a species I knew so little about, but as we spotted carp after carp cruising the outer edge of the flats, I began to accept my new found respect for these fish. Many people back home shoot carp with bow and arrow and simply throw them to the wayside as if they are worth nothing more than a moment’s excitement. How the carp ever came to be such a disrespected game fish is beyond me, but I now believe the first time any consummate conservationist sees one of these finicky feeding, beautiful beasts cruising crystal clear water in search of forage, their perception will be forever changed.

We moored the boat in a few feet of water and began a stealthy approach to the shallows. The water temperature in the bay we were stalking was 75 degrees; perfect for feeding fish. Stalking fish with a fly rod, in essence allows me to combine two of my greatest passions; fishing and hunting. I slipped up behind a large boulder, positioning myself 50 feet or so from a small pod of a half-dozen carp. Fly placement is crucial when fishing carp. Their eyesight is poor and they’re not aggressive chasers. It’s essential to present your fly within an area the size of a basketball hoop in front of the fish you’re targeting.

Assumptions are always dangerous when lacking proper research. Based on sheer numbers alone, I figured these fish would be easy to catch, but they are not. I worked this little pod for nearly an 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-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 a good fifteen minutes before I finally brought the fish to hand. As I cradled the

fish, I realized never before in nature had I physically experienced a lesson of ignorance so profound, so obviously wrong. Carp are amazing. I released the fish back into the aqua waters as carefully as I would have a 25 in. Au Sable "Holy Waters" brown trout.

A nearby boulder begged me to take a break. I saddled onto the rock, realizing that in no direction could I see the hand of man. The only sounds I could hear were the waves breaking on the shore behind, and the wind whipping across the endless water. In search of carp on a fly, I found a paradise on Beaver Island.

For more information regarding travel to Beaver Island, contact the Beaver island Chamber of Commerce at (231) 448-2505 or view their website www.beaverisland.org. Travel to beaver Island can be arranged through the Beaver Island Boat Company by calling 1-888-446-4095 or by visiting their website www.bibco.com.

Brandon Butler is a syndicated outdoor writer from Bloomington, Indiana. He may be contacted through his website www.driftwoodoutdoors.org.

***This article is no longer on the In-Fisherman site, click on this link to go to a new post with the article.***

Click here to visit the In-Fisherman site, it has an endless amount of top-notch information.

The article "Prime Time Carp" by Kevin Morlock appeared in the March 2009 issue of In-Fisherman.

Click here to see a pdf copy of Prime Time Carp by Kevin Morlock…

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