A GRAND Traverse Bay Adventure

Where do I even start on this one. Every year we hope for Grand Traverse Bay to freeze and most years we are disappointed by the end of the season. This year brought the cold and just enough to calm to make it happen. However there was a sense of urgency this time around. Ice reports were all over the place and there was a big warm up coming. Ideally we would wait for conditions that gave us confidence to travel with machines and as late as possible for the maximum burbot opportunity. But things can change in an instant with that ice and there is always the threat it could blow out. Rather than risk missing an opportunity, it was go time for “trouts and pouts 2026”. For those that don’t know what a “pout” is, eelpout is another name for burbot.

The weather was optimal with nice temps and light winds. Usually that isn’t the case when we travel up north. We checked all the boxes and brought all the things. There were 5 of us and then some locals would periodically meet up with us. Shanties, snowmobile, snow dog, electronics, 3 augers, and even packed some food this time. We didn’t even know what we would be able to use. I never sat in a shanty for a minute but the 2 Clam Nanooks were key for transporting people to and from the spots. We have our Nanooks rigged with a tow point at both sides so we could run a rather large train of equipment onto the ice. We didn’t come all this way to walk straight out from an access and plop down at the first deep water spot. Conditions were great for travel, little to no snow on the ice. Even without machines, you could walk forever and with the weather minimal gear was needed. I was comfortable in my Clam Delta Suit all weekend, it got so warm at times that we were all just fishing in bibs.

The initial assessment of the ice is that it was good to go. Trevor, Luke, and AC had made it up first and were already catching them. We finally got there and everyone was catching trout but me. I was getting really frustrated because usually I’ve got that figured out. I put on the trusty P-Line glow green tiger and righted the ship though. My first trout was a good one and my best laker of the trip (and there were a lot of lakers). But I still couldn’t keep up with the newly crowned “LTK” Lake Trout King Luke. Who was the most rookie member of the crew. No equipment, no lake trout experience, but apparently was a quick learner to the trout game. If you can get around those trout they are going to give you opportunities to learn and of the 4 places I’ve fished lakers through the ice are by far the most cooperative. It’s funny when I look back at my phone, I have hardly any trout pictures. I got a good one right away and then just had so much fun catching more. We released all of the big trout and reserved our limits for trout that were hooked deep or were really bleeding. Eventually we switched over to burbot for the night and I had high hopes despite being early in the season. We had done really well here in 2019 when the bay froze although it was several weeks later.

The burbs just never really showed up, there was one flurry of marks around dark and that was it. I was lucky enough to land the only burb of the night and it was a good one. The picture doesn’t really do it justice at how fat that burbot was. I was glad the pressure was off to get one because things didn’t look too promising for the weekend. Thinking back on it, maybe we should have pushed shallower. We did move around some but even when we would mark them, they did not want to commit. Fishing burbs can be so frustrating at times especially when they slowly rise up to your bait, go back down, rise up again, and you just can’t quite figure out the right thing to make that fish bite. It’s especially heartbreaking when you don’t get many opportunities in a night. We called it a night a little earlier than normal because it wasn’t working out and we knew we had a trout smash ahead of us in the morning. Then once we got back to the Wheat’s where we stayed for the weekend we stayed up way too late. Huge thanks to them for putting up with us all weekend.

The morning of day 2 was going to be a total area switch up. 2 of us were going to go on foot from a private access and the rest of the crew was going to come up from the launch on snowmobile. This was on the west side of east bay and we found the ice to much more variable and the pressure cracks much more open and heaved up. Since we were already on the ice we stayed and the snowmobile crew headed the other direction. It was an extremely short walk to the fish, about 600 yards and several cracks, one of which actually took some navigating to get back across. We punched some holes where we had got them in 2019 and then a bunch shallower in the 60-90 foot depth zone that had been good the day before. It took me about 5 minutes to find a good hole and hook 3 fish on consecutive drops. It was game on the rest of the morning and we even had a couple opportunities to put ciscos on the ice. The other crew had found even more cisco and some really nice trout where they went. Around midday the bite got tough, maybe due to the high sun? But between the sun and heat we decided to head to the Peninsula Grill and grab a bite to eat before going exploring in the evening.

I had hoped to get off another private access and try a real experimental spot on the bay for burbs but that wasn’t going to work out. So we headed to where I caught my first bay burbot in 2016ish. It was much later in the year that trip and I didn’t have a waypoint but we could cut enough enough ice to experiment. We never found much of anything. I absolutely marked a couple but I really never found a good mossy spot anywhere and just didn’t feel good about it. Our buddy “The Dragon” did cook everyone up hot dogs and clam chowder on the ice. It was hard to beat a more scenic spot for dinner even if there were no burbot. We were all exhausted and decided the best plan would be to regroup and get a good early start on the trout and cisco for the morning.

Cisco were going to be the target today, we had all caught enough trout. We had big dreams of a jet sled full of them but they were so finicky. They also are hard to keep on the hook a lot of times with their delicate mouth. The cisco distraction was frustrating and also caused us to miss out on some good lake trout time, although they were mixing in down on the bottom. I probably was too stubborn with my tactics for them and I wasn’t super prepared for them. I hadn’t encountered any on my last ice fishing bay trip, although I’ve had lots of success in the boat. They sure were spooky at times and I don’t think the clear ice and suspended nature of them helped with that. But it was exciting to see the massive schools come through. It would be interesting to see how all of a sudden one fish in the school would activate and been all over your stuff but never fully commit. I’ve sight fished them on Muskegon lake and watched how they feed and they really are terrible at getting a bait in their mouth. So I think a lot of it is they just aren’t that efficient at feeding like a lake trout is. We absolutely had to work harder on this day but it was still pretty dang good. There is just something special about fighting those big lake trout through the ice. I had one particular fish that just let me reel it up 50 feet, I was starting to get hopeful it was a burbot when all of a sudden it peeled drag all the way back down to the bottom and it did that twice. The nice thing is we had caught so many there was no intense pressure to land them or major devastation if they got off. The first order of business upon arriving home was washing our ice suits because we all smelled like we had been taking a bath in lake trout slime.

A variety of baits were effective out there like spoons, tubes, and tailspinners. I’m sure you could really get crazy with things that work. But for me it is hard to put down a 1 ounce P-Line laser minnow. When fishing 60-130 feet of water that weight is nice for getting the bait down fast. I also caught fish on the new P-Line Haruki jig, a sneaky double rattle Duke Creek Tackle spoon, and a homemade fatter spoon in straight glow. Most of the lake trout I was catching I would see rise up on the graph but I did get down there close to the bottom and jig in the sonar dead zone. I couldn’t see anything that was going with my electronics but after looking at the lake trout stomachs and finding gobies and a few smelt. I knew what they were doing down there. You could go to Grand Traverse Bay with the right tackle and catch plenty of trout with no electronics provided you are in the right area.

As you can see from the pictures we all got some really nice lakers. The quality was better than when I fished on the ice in 2019 and Trevor lost a real monster right under the ice. AC got the trout of the tip with that big orange finned beast. Unfortunately I wasn’t up there yet so I didn’t get to see it in person as all those big trout were released.

It was truly a special trip, any trip on the ice on Grand Traverse Bay is. The fishing is great but the adventure of the whole thing is the best part. You are on a bay of Lake Michigan and it is huge. It’s a vast area and mostly unexplored as almost all the pressure is concentrated straight out from an access point. So much water all there for exploring and you almost never have to fish next to someone you don’t know. I’m sure there are surprises lurking out there too although we’ve never found one. Browns, steelhead, coho, kings, walleye, muskie, and giant smallmouth are all out there somewhere. Low numbers of them (well except for the smallmouth) but the chance is always there. It makes it hard to come back home and go perch fishing. I know I’ll do it to get the girls out but I’m really just dreaming of the next trip with trouts and pouts involved.

The big question is will the bay ice survive? There are a lot of different ice sheets and the separation between them is what worries me. AC did catch a lake trout out of one of them though, so it saved us some time from drilling a hole. The next couple of days are going to be telling and I think a lot will depend on the wind and how it moves those ice sheets around or if it blows anything out. I’m holding out some hope for trouts and pouts 2026 2.0, but if not at least I don’t have to live with the regret of missing out on a rare opportunity. I am at least confident that there are going to be some other lakes with a chance for adventure and I know I will be up that way once more this season.