The Les Cheneaux Islands are thirty-six pieces of Michigan scattered along the north shore of Lake Huron in a way that suggests somebody dropped them. Between them run channels of water so clear that on a calm September morning you can sit in eight feet and count the individual stalks of cabbage weed on the bottom. This is beautiful, and it is also a problem, because a northern pike in clear water gets to make an informed decision about your lure. In stained water a pike is a reflex. Here it is a critic.
The fishing is simple to describe and hard to do well. You idle the outside edge where the weeds stop and the bottom falls into darker water, and you throw a big spoon or a soft plastic across the seam and bring it back fast enough to look nervous. Most of the time nothing happens. Then a shape the color of an old dollar bill separates itself from the weeds and follows, six inches behind the bait, absolutely level, matching your speed with no visible effort at all. That is the part nobody prepares you for. A following pike does not chase. It commutes.
What you do next decides everything, and there is no agreement among reasonable people about what that is. Speed up and half of them fire. Speed up and the other half turn off like a light switch. Stop the lure dead and you either get a strike that soaks your forearms or you get a fish that looks at the thing sinking, looks at the boat, and goes back to work. We tried all of it in one morning and got a full sample of every possible outcome, which is a polite way of saying we caught three fish and watched eleven.
There was a fourth that we do not count. It came out of a pocket in the cabbage on the last cast of a spot, ate a spoon two feet from the gunwale, and turned so hard it threw water into the boat. My cousin, who had been talking for twenty minutes about the resale value of a snowmobile, made a sound that I would describe as involuntary. The fish came off at the net. He blamed the net. The net has been in the family for years and has never once been at fault.
By noon the wind came up out of the west and put a chop on the channels, which took away the clear-water problem and gave us a wind problem instead. We caught two more. The good news about pike in that country is that they are always somewhere in the weeds. The bad news is that so are the weeds.
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