Southeastern Michigan isn’t necessarily the first place you think about when you’re considering a fishing adventure in our great state, but it’s hard to imagine there’s anywhere better on a day-in, day-out basis. A number of years ago, a Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist told me that the Great Lakes and connecting waters from Port Huron south accounted for almost two-thirds of the Great Lakes fishing pressure in Michigan. And although that struck me as unlikely at the time, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. The fishing – for walleye, muskie and smallmouth bass – is, almost all would agree, world-class.
This trio of anglers, Gust and Nick Lehnertz and Phil Gwizdz enjoyed the spring run of white bass where they hit just about any bait you throw at them like a freight train!
But there’s another fishery that receives almost no accolades, but is almost as good as it is anywhere in the world: the white bass run in spring. The last time I went there specifically to chase the whites (aka silver bass in these parts), I took a buddy who doesn’t fish much and told him we’d catch 100 fish that day. He was skeptical. It took about three hours. And we never even got to where I wanted to fish.
We launched at Elizabeth Park near the mouth of the Detroit River and as we ran upriver to an area I had pre-selected, the hot horn on my outboard went off. I shut the engine down, dropped the trolling motor and announced that it looked like we were going to start here. First cast – bingo.
We fished a rather non-descript section of river with a seawall along the Michigan bank and never fired up the big motor again until we were ready to leave. There was rarely a two minute stretch that one of us didn’t have a fish on – and that includes re-tying when we broke off.
Although they are much more appreciated in the South than they are up here, white bass are a great quarry. They hit a bait like a freight train and never quit until you haul them in. They school in such prodigious numbers that if you hook one and it gets off, you often hook another before you can retrieve your lure. And they’ll smash just about anything you throw at them –spinners, crankbaits, spoons, jigs. . . I’ve even caught them on buzzbaits when the fishing was so outrageously hot that we started throwing things to see if there was something they wouldn’t take.
Fly fishing? A few years back, I had a 100 fish day with a buddy throwing streamers and popping bugs.
These days, when I target white bass, I fish a lead-head jig with a plastic trailer, usually a four-inch worm, but curly tails and paddle tails work just as well. In the past, I always started with a baitfish-colored trailer – white, pearl or clear with glitter – but in recent years, I just put on the first worm I grab. When the whites are on a suicide bite (as it seems like they always are in the spring) they’ll hit anything.
But the first thing I do is pinch down the barb on the hook because these critters are hard to handle. They are sharp everywhere – sharp find, sharp gill covers, I swear, even their lips are sharp. By pinching down the barb, you can grab the jig by the head and shake the fish off, so you don’t have to handle them at all. If you’re of a mind to keep them, you can shake them right off into the ice chest or live well – I’d recommend the ice chest, so when it comes time to clean them, you won’t have to handle them while they’re still alive – or you can just shake them off back into the water. But even after they’re dead, it’s a good idea to wear one of those Kevlar gloves when you’re cleaning them as they are SHARP.
Now, a quick word on eating them – they are fine. No, they’re not yellow perch. But white are the diminutive relatives of striped bass, which are highly prized by some seafood aficionados. They are relatively soft fleshed, so they filet pretty easily. They often have a large bloodline along their sides, which I suspect gives them a stronger taste. It can be easily trimmed off when you skin them, but last I checked, they were being sold skin-on. And they were selling for $14 to $19.99 a pound (though there was a reference to Kroger offering them for $9.99 a pound). Last year, when I was fishing with veteran southeast Michigan guide Steve Van Assche after we’d limited out on ‘eyes and my brother and I were releasing the whites, he said, “You’re throwing away some awful good eating.”
The whites typically start showing up in the Detroit River in late April, and you’ll catch them on occasion while walleye jigging, but by May they’re in enough numbers that if you target them, you can catch a boatload. They congregate in big schools near structure elements. When I first started fishing them in the river, I concentrated on the flats near drop-offs and caught ‘em well, though over the years I’ve found they are really likely to stack up anywhere there’s a current break.
Several years back, I was fishing for bass in June with veteran Ontario angler Jon Bondy and when we passed a pier at a marina on Lake St. Clair, the whites were there. I asked Bondy to hang on a minute as I wanted to see how long it would take me to catch 50. It took 50 minutes, though I had to retie twice. Often when you hauled one in, the water was boiling with them aside the boat.
Perhaps the easiest way to find them is to watch for birds diving into the water to feed. The whites will herd the baitfish up toward the surface and terns and gulls will feed on the surfacing baitfish. If you see it happening, throw into the frenzy, let your jig drop for a second or two, and just start reeling. Easy as pie.
Now, if there’s no surface activity, you can still catch ‘em deep. A number of years back, when fishing with Bondy on the lower end of the river and we didn’t see much going on, Bondy cruised the river channel and watched the sonar until it lit up like a Christmas tree. We then proceeded to vertically jig them with spoons. Bondy said he had enough when he hit 100. At that point, I had 88. It took less than two hours. Bondy told me he had a trio of guys hire him for a white bass trip a few years back who were aiming to fill a charter boat-sized cooler and though I can no longer recall the exact number Bondy said they caught, I remember it was well north of 1,000.
There’s no limit on white bass on the Ontario side of the river. On the U.S. side, it’s 25. I have known guys who go to Canada to catch them by the hundreds. But do you really want to clean that many?
A lot of river rats fish them with minnows, either on bottom or under slip bobbers. When the run is in full swing, you’ll see plenty of shore-bound anglers lining the bank, casting for them, some with minnows, some with lures. Plenty of them get caught that way.
The run usually lasts into June, though some years it runs into August. What’s interesting to me is that outside of the spawning run, nobody seems to pay any attention to where they go. We regularly catch them incidentally while trolling for walleyes in Lake Erie and occasionally catch them bass fishing in Lake St. Clair, but you know they’re out there somewhere all year-round. That nobody (to my knowledge) has bothered to pattern them the rest of the year is surprising. When I lived in Texas we fished them year-round, in the rivers during the spring spawning run. I had a standing appointment with one buddy to fish every Valentine’s Day in the Brazos River, and in the reservoirs the rest of the year. Usually, it was looking for topwater feeding frenzies in warm weather or jigging with spoons in cold-weather months.
If anyone out there knows where they concentrate in the summer, let me know, eh? I’m sure there’s a fantastic fishery out there somewhere.
