The Martiny Chain of Lakes

Six in the morning on Big Evans, and the water is the temperature of nothing. No colder than the air, no warmer. A northern pike hits something back in the reeds and you don’t see it — you hear it, which is worse, because now you’re thinking about it for the rest of the paddle.

Nobody flooded the Martiny lakes to be beautiful. They flooded them to hold water. A beaver got the job started, the way the story runs, sometime in the early 1900s, and in 1955 the state finished the argument with the Winchester Dam on Tubbs Lake, which raised the water more than eight feet and pulled a scatter of separate lakes into one connected system. Eight lakes on a single thread of water — Big Evans, Tubbs, Saddlebag, Boom, Lost, Dogfish, and a couple more depending on who’s counting. You can run a small boat out of one and into the next without ever touching a trailer. That’s the appeal. A chain you don’t have to break.

It sits southwest of Barryton, a block of state land in the middle of Mecosta County that most of the traffic headed for the golf resorts never turns off for. Which is the arithmetic of the place. The people who know it, know it. The rest keep driving toward the tee times and never learn what they passed.

What the flooding actually is, once you’re on it, is drowned country. Stumps break the surface where a forest stood before the water came up over it, and you learn to read the black crowns of them the way you’d read rocks in a river, because a lower unit costs more than the whole trip. Herons work the edges. In the marsh channels between the bigger lakes the reeds close in until the horizon is grass at eye level and you steer by the gap. It smells like a swamp, because it is one — warm and rank and alive, a smell no candle company would bottle and a duck hunter would pay for. At night the frogs own the place. You’ll hear them from the tent.

The DNR keeps all of it as the Martiny Lake State Game Area, which is the official way of saying the ducks and the bass got here first and you’re the guest. Twenty-three fish species have been logged in the flooding. Largemouth, northern pike, bluegill, pumpkinseed, rock bass, black crappie, yellow perch — the honest, unshowy roster of a Michigan panfish water. Over ten years the flooding gave up eight Master Angler entries, and most of them were bowfin and crappie, not bass. Bowfin. The old men call them dogfish, which is how one of the lakes got its name, and if you ever hook one you’ll understand the tone of the naming.

It fishes the way flooded marsh fishes. Slow water, a lot of it, wood everywhere, weeds coming up thick by July until the panfish and the bass both hold in the salad and you’re throwing weedless or you’re not throwing at all. People pole small boats along the timber for crappie in spring and bluegill in early summer, and when the flooding freezes the shanties go out over the same shallows. Nobody comes here for one big fish. They come for a hundred small ones and the chance the hundred-and-first is a pike that ruins the panfish rod.

Six public launches ring the chain, and the first one you drive to will be the wrong one. Lower Evans, Big Evans, Upper Evans, the ramp under the Winchester Dam, the one out at Tubbs Island — gravel, most of them, cut back off roads that don’t announce themselves. The one on Big Evans is a single paved lane with room for about fifteen trailers, and a Recreation Passport is the price of admission. First come, first served. No booth, no attendant, nobody to take your name. If you want to sleep on the water, Tubbs Lake carries two rustic state forest campgrounds — an Island grounds and a Mainland grounds, 33 sites between them, run by the Mecosta County Parks Commission. Vault toilets. A hand pump. A fire ring and a picnic table and that is the end of the list. No reservations. You take what’s open, or you drive the eight miles back toward Barryton and sit with your choices.

Come in June. By then the bluegills are up on their beds in the shallows, close enough to the top that you can smell the spawn — a low, muddy, green smell that means the panfish have lost their minds for a week or two and a kid with a bobber can’t miss. The bass are shallow and mean. The pike have pulled off into whatever cool water they can find, which on a flooding this warm is not much. We keep a place near the chain — https://roamstays.com/properties/three-shores-retreat/ — close enough that you can be on Tubbs before the coffee goes cold. Pair it with the Mecosta guide and don’t overthink the rest.

The pike hits again on the way in. You still don’t see it. Good.