Where can you fish in southeast Michigan?

Metamora sits in the high, rolling horse country of Lapeer County, an hour north of Detroit, and the question comes up at the club more often than you might expect — from guests, from members’ children, from bird hunters who did not know we keep water at all. The honest answer takes a few minutes, because this corner of the state fishes better than its reputation.

The big water

Start with the water everyone drives past. Lake St. Clair, the broad, shallow plate between Detroit and Lake Huron, is counted among the best smallmouth bass waters in the country, and it grows muskellunge in numbers nobody would have believed forty years ago. Below it, the Detroit River runs a spring walleye migration that fills every launch on the west bank. Neither is a secret, and neither is quiet, but a fisherman in southeast Michigan who has never worked a St. Clair weed flat in June owes himself the trip.

The inland lakes

Closer to home, the map is stippled with small water. The metroparks keep dependable bass and panfish lakes — Kent Lake at Kensington, Stony Creek north of Rochester — and Lapeer County holds its own: Holloway Reservoir on the Flint River for walleye and crappie, and the little state recreation lake at Metamora-Hadley, ten minutes from our gate. None of it is grand. Most of it is good, particularly on a weekday evening when the pontoon traffic thins. And nearly all of it fishes again through the ice come January.

Where can you catch trout in southeast Michigan?

Trout are comparatively scarce. Nearly all of Michigan’s storied trout water lies well north of here, and the region keeps only one stream of any trout reputation — Paint Creek, between Lake Orion and Rochester, managed for brown trout. The state lends a hand each spring, planting adult trout in the Huron River below the Proud Lake dam, in the Clinton River at Auburn Hills, and in Spring Mill Pond at Island Lake. It is honest fishing, but it is brief.

A fisherman who wants trout more than a few weeks a year faces a choice: the long drive north, or private water.

Is there a private fishing club near Detroit?

There is — ours. Hunters Creek Club boasts a 60-acre lake and a chain of trout ponds on 1,400 acres in Metamora, an hour north of the city. The ponds hold the trout; the lake carries bass, pike, bluegill, and crappie, and members fish it year-round — through the ice once winter takes hold. The club also hosts fly-fishing clinics, where a visiting instructor teaches casting on the water and fly tying at the bench.