Musky & Pike in Michigan

Four Great Lakes shorelines and thousands of inland rivers and lakes give Michigan more guided fishing water than most anglers could cover in a lifetime. Charter boats troll Lake Michigan and Lake Huron for trophy salmon and trout; drift boats slide down rivers like the Au Sable and Manistee for trout and steelhead. The settings shift from deep open water to cedar-lined river bends, and the guides shift with them, a Great Lakes captain and a river fly guide are practicing different crafts, and Michigan has plenty of both.

The Great Lakes carry the headline fisheries: Chinook and Coho salmon, lake trout, brown trout, steelhead. Lake Michigan ports like Ludington, Manistee, and Holland built their reputations on salmon runs. Saginaw Bay on Lake Huron is walleye water, and famous for it. Down in the southeast corner, Michigan's slice of Lake Erie near Monroe sits on one of the best walleye fisheries anywhere. This is big water: the kind that demands a proper boat, real electronics, and a captain who reads currents and temperature breaks for a living. That's exactly what a charter buys you.

Inland, the state is laced with rivers and lakes holding smallmouth and largemouth bass, northern pike, muskie, and panfish. The Upper Peninsula offers the remote end of the spectrum, lakes like Gogebic and the inland stretches of rivers draining toward Lake Superior. In the central Lower Peninsula, the Pere Marquette and Boardman Rivers carry near-mythic reputations for wild trout and migratory steelhead; fishing them well takes skill, and fishing them with a guide shortens the learning curve considerably. Whatever the season, some corner of this system is producing.