Say "Michigan" to a fly angler and you get one word back: trout. It's a legitimate trout destination and it has earned that reputation. But our guest on this episode — a Grand Rapids guide in his third full season in Michigan after getting his start down in North Carolina — makes a point that reframes the whole state. Brook trout are native. Brown trout and rainbows are not, even though they run wild now. The fish that were always there, in numbers, are smallmouth bass and pike. And there is wonderful smallmouth fishing right in town in Grand Rapids.
That's the opportunity. People fly in, drive past miles of native warmwater habitat to reach a trout river, and never realize what they went around. Here's how to fish it.
Fix your rod angle before you fix anything else
This was the most immediately useful thing in the conversation, and it costs nothing. Most trout anglers coming to streamer fishing hold the rod up at a 45 or 90 degree angle out of habit. That angle puts a belly of slack between the rod tip and the fly. When you strip, roughly half of that strip is spent pulling slack out of the system before the fly moves at all.
Two things break as a result. Your fly never achieves the sharp, erratic movement that triggers a smallmouth or a pike, because every strip starts soft. And when a fish does eat, you have slack to remove before the hook does anything, which is why so many warmwater eats feel like a bump that went nowhere.
The fix: get the rod tip down, low and pointed straight at the fly, ideally touching the water. Now the line is tight from hand to fly, every inch of strip translates directly into motion, and a strip set drives the hook instead of taking up slack. This one adjustment changes your hookup rate more than any fly swap will.
Steal from the conventional guys
Our guest was refreshingly unsnobby about where warmwater fly patterns should come from. The productive stuff borrows openly from conventional bass fishing — crayfish patterns tied and fished like jigging nymphs, bounced along bottom, plus small baitfish profiles. These aren't swung like spey patterns. They're worked, hopped, and given deliberate action.
The reasoning is sound. Smallmouth eat crayfish as a staple, and the conventional bass world has spent decades optimizing crayfish presentations. A jig hops off bottom and falls; a fly can do the same thing if you tie it with the weight forward and fish it with authority instead of drifting it. Around structure — he mentioned swinging the front of an island and working crayfish patterns there — that hop-and-fall cadence is what gets bit.
Worth calibrating your expectations, too: a 12-inch smallmouth on a fly rod is, as he put it, arguably a lot more fun than a comparable trout. These fish punch above their length. You do not need a 20-incher for the day to be worth it.
Wire leaders: a conditional yes, not a blanket rule
Pike will cut you off, so the wire question comes up immediately, and the answer here is genuinely useful because it's conditional rather than dogmatic.
In dirty, muddy, or fast water — run wire almost every time. His experience is that pike simply don't get turned off by a wire leader that often in murky spring conditions. The water does the concealing for you, and the insurance against losing a good fish and leaving a fly in its mouth is worth it.
In clear water — absolutely not. No wire. In clear conditions the leader becomes visible enough to cost you eats, and he isn't typically throwing the kind of fly that demands it in that water anyway.
He connects wire to mono with a simple two- or three-turn connection rather than anything elaborate — the point being that this doesn't need to be a project. For topwater he goes a different direction entirely: around five feet of heavier mono, short and stout, because a popper needs a leader that will turn over, not one that will present delicately.
Where the fish are, and when
One observation here is worth planning around: pike water and big-smallmouth water are not the same water. In a spot that holds pike, you'll catch a pike — because that's where they live — or you'll catch a 20-inch smallmouth, but he doubts the truly big smallmouth cohabitate with pike much. Smaller pike in the 20-inch range may overlap, but the trophy versions of each fish tend to hold separately.
Practically, that means deciding what you're hunting before you launch, then fishing the water that matches. If you want a big smallmouth, don't fish the weedy pike flat and hope.
Seasonally, he's throwing streamers essentially year-round — Michigan has produced excellent winter streamer fishing for him — with water temperature and oxygenation driving where fish stack up more than the calendar does. Spring is prime for pike, when they move shallow into that faster, murkier water where wire earns its keep.
Gear
Straight talk: the two things you actually need for this that we don't sell are a spool of bite wire and a box of crayfish and baitfish patterns in the 3 to 5 inch range. Get those from your local fly shop, and while you're there ask which local water holds smallmouth — shops know, and this is exactly the kind of fishery that lives on local knowledge rather than magazine articles.
Where we can help is the rigging side, which is where most people bleed fish on warmwater trips. Leader construction, the wire-to-mono connection, short stout topwater leaders, and the knots that hold up to a pike's teeth are all covered in our Tips and Tricks for Fly Fishing eBook. And since smallmouth fishing is largely a bright-sun, shallow-water game where you're reading structure through glare, a brimmed FFIP Five Panel Cap is doing real work, not just looking good in the boat.
