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Special to the Record-Eagle/Linda Gallagher
An avid angler, Doug Green thought at first he’d hooked a big walleye on Lake Bellaire on the night of June 23. Instead, the pull on the line proved to be from a monster Master Angler musky.
Great Lakes musky? Try Chain 0’ Lakes
If you’re looking for a great spot in northern Michigan to try for the state’s second largest species of game fish, then Antrim County’s Chain of Lakes is the place to be.
Bill Lambert, a veteran Antrim County angler, and Doug Green, of White Lake, knew that on the recent hot late June night they headed out to Lake Bellaire, a central body of water in the county’s chain.
“But we weren’t fishing for musky, we were trying for a walleye dinner,”
laughed Lambert, a former Village of Bellaire employee.
Still, Green, Lambert’s uncle, also a lifelong
angler, will keep the 41- pound, 54.5-inch Master Angler Great Lakes musky he landed on June 23.
The largest he had ever caught, Green is having the fish mounted, Lam- bert said.
“We were trolling late at night with a couple of walleye to our credit, but
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Outdoor Columnist
not a lot,” Lambert said. “It was a pretty poor night until the 8-pound Trilene he was using just started peeling off his reel.” At first, the anglers
thought Green had lured
a big walleye, which Lake
Bellaire is known for occasionally producing, to
his green and silver Hot
N Tot bait from a depth of
55 feet.
“Then he jumped, and we saw what he had on the line,” Lambert added. Without any type of leader, neither had a lot of faith that the fish could actually be landed, but
after an intense 25 minute battle, the monster fish, just a few pounds short of the state record, was successfully boated. Recalling the experience, Lambert noted several other muskies taken from the Antrim County lake in recent years. “I took one through the ice just a year or so ago that was an inch short of the legal length of 42 inches,” he said. “And some friends of mine found one that had died and washed up on the shore of the lake a while back. That one was just a bit smaller than Doug’s, at 53 inches.” Antrim’s Chain of Lakes has produced both of the state’s records for Great Lakes muskellunge. One was taken in 1985 on Clam Lake by the late Wendell Nichols that weighed 47 pounds. The other was taken on Lake Skegemog by Charles Edgecomb in 1984 that weighed 48 pounds. Several of the Master Angler entries taken in the last few years
have been on the Chain 0’ Lakes. It’s eclipsed only by famed Lake St. Clair, often touted as the “musky capital of the world.”
But Doug Green knows where the “musky capital of the world” really is
— right here in northern Michigan.
And the fishery could be getting even better with recent efforts by the Bellaire Conservation Club and Antrim Conservation District to provide the lake with much needed nursery and habitat in the form of fallen trees and brush piles, which will be placed at strategic points along the shoreline before the end of the summer. “With work like that, the future of all fishing on Lake Bellaire and Antrim’s Chain of Lakes, including the musky fishing, will look pretty good,” Bill Lambert said with a grin.
For his uncle Doug, it already does.