I have always been impressed by the resilience of Mother Nature. There’s probably no better example than Lake Erie. When I was a kid, it was unaffectionately known as the Dead Sea. It was a polluted mess. Today, it is probably the best walleye fishery in the world and smallmouth bass and perch fishing are excellent as well.
But a less heralded – yet equally impressive – example is the Kalamazoo River. I fish it a day or so every year for smallmouths with my buddy Scott Markham, usually in the heat of the summer, in the Kalamazoo area. Although we don’t always ring them up, we always have a productive and enjoyable experience. And often there’s a surprise or two as well.
Like this year, on my first cast of our early evening trip, I hooked what felt like a pretty fair fish, but when I brought it to the net, it wasn’t a brown bass. It was a largemouth bass in the 3-plus-pound category. And before we left that first spot, we caught a couple of smallmouths, a pair of pike, and a bluegill.
Scott Markham shows off a five-pound-plus Kalamazoo River smallmouth.
What’s so impressive is that the Kalamazoo River has been abused, in about as many ways as possible, by mankind. Where we were fishing, below Morrow Dam, it’s a Superfund site and it has been for 35 years. It’s so contaminated by PBCs that there’s a fish consumption advisory that extends all the way downstream to Lake Michigan.
Originally contaminated by a paper mill, it has endured additional insults over the years. Certainly, you remember the oil spill about a decade ago (that occurred upstream from there) that made national news and killed plenty of wildlife and fish. I was working at the Department of Natural Resources at the time and spent a day down there with a Fisheries Division crew netting and cleaning up turtles. It was a mess.
But the stretch below Morrow Dam was terribly impacted by a mismanaged drawdown at the dam a couple of years back, when tons of sediment from the upstream impoundment were allowed to travel downstream. If you had been there before and after, you’d probably think you were on a different river. What used to be bays were turned into huge mud flats. My partner, Markham, says that much of the spawning habitat, which had a gravelly/rocky bottom, was covered in silt.
According to Markham, who has been guiding smallmouth fishermen there part-time for more than 20 years, it has had an impact.
“The numbers are still down a bit since the big mud release,” he said, “But it’s still a better than average fishery, really a quality fishery. There are lots of species and lots of good-sized fish.”
Markham’s observation is echoed by Brian Gunderman, the DNR fisheries biologist who oversees the river.
“With all the challenges that river has, it’s an exceptional smallmouth bass stream,” Gunderman said. “We know there was a lot of sediment released and there’s an ongoing lawsuit with the dam owner (Eagle Creek Renewable Energy LLC, a Canadian Company).”
But there’s a silver lining to that catastrophe, Gunderman said. The stretch above Morrow Dam grew up in vegetation and pike responded with exceptional spawns.
“There are big year-classes of pike,” he said.
Though remediation on the Superfund site is ongoing, “it’ll be years before the cleanup is done,” Gunderman said. “It’s a slow process.”
So, it may be decades before the fish are safe to eat. But in the meantime, the fishing is very good. Markham and I usually boat 20 to 40 smallies in a four- or five-hour trip. Some of them are little squeakers, of course, which is par for stream smallmouth fishing. But we always catch a bunch of fish that would have been keepers before the bass minimum size limit was raised to 14 inches, and we usually have at least a few that are genuine good ones.
“As for the upstream stretch contaminated by the oil spill, Gunderman said, ‘it’s definitely recovering.” But so much oil-logged timber had to be removed that “it’s taken a while to rebuild that habitat – there’s not as much cover for fish as there has been, so there aren’t as many big bass as there used to be.”
As for our trip this summer, we wound up catching 25 smallmouths in about 4 ½ hours, including one that was just a smidgeon shy of 21 inches. On a length/weight conversion chart (we didn’t have a scale) for smallmouths, that’s a 5 ½-pound fish, which is a good smallmouth anywhere.
Typically, we do most of our damage with bottom-bumping baits – tubes, grubs and jigs – but this year, crankbaits were king. Markham suggested that was because it had rained pretty hard a couple of days earlier, and that put a little color in the water.
“Tubes and grubs are especially productive in the late summer when the water’s clearer, and the strike zone narrows,” Markham said. “I think with the colored-up water, we got more reaction bites. In August, they want to be around heavy current, and they get out of the current behind the rocks and then dart out to grab a crayfish.”
Markham fishes a number of stretches on the Kazoo, but he says he really likes the stretch below Morrow Dam because it has the best combination of deeper water and fast current of any of the other stretches. Those are the tickets for success during the summer months, he said, but as the water cools, they become less important.
“That deep water holds the fish throughout the summer and produces bigger fish,” he said.
Markham begins his season as soon as the ice is out.
“I’ll get started as soon as the boat launch is open,” he said. “That time of year, you catch some really good fish. You don’t necessarily catch a lot of fish, but you can catch some tanks coming out of the winter.”
He fishes “until the boat launch is frozen. You never know what you’ll catch right before ice – pike, walleye, bass. It’s very few bites, but when you do get bit, it’s usually a good one.”
Overall, it’s bottom bouncing or crankbaits. He’ll fish a topwater if he sees surface activity, which isn’t very often, and in spring, he’ll fish a spinnerbait some, but generally does better with crankbaits, even in spring.
“The smallmouth really relate to the rocks and you like to have that crankbait ricochet off the rocks,” he said. “That seems to trigger them.”
