The Martiny Chain of Lakes near Barryton

Fifty degrees on the water at six in the morning, and the chain smells like wet weed, two-stroke oil, and something dead the pike already found in the shallows. The dead thing is a good sign. It means they are feeding.

None of this water is where it wants to be. The Martiny Chain is a flooding — the local noun, not a verb — pushed into being by Winchester Dam on the South Branch of the Chippewa River back in the mid-1950s, when about 1,600 acres of ground went under and stayed there. Eight separate lakes drowned their own shorelines and shook hands underwater. Now you can run a boat from Big Evans to Tubbs to Dogfish to Bass through a circle of channels without once lifting the hull onto a trailer. Saddlebag. Boom. Lost. The names read like a salvage inventory, which is more or less what they are.

Around all of it sits more than 6,000 acres of state game land, a quarter of it water and marsh, draining some 38 square miles of Mecosta County into one shallow, fertile, weed-thick bowl. Anglers call that good water. Boaters call it a transmission bill. The flooded timber is still down there, softened but not gone, and the back bays close over with weed by late summer until they read more like a wet field than a lake. Go slow. Everyone learns this the same way, and the ones who learned it the hard way tell you at the ramp, unprompted.

What lives in the water is the reason anybody drives out here. A 2017 state survey counted 23 species in the flooding, and the ones you will actually put in the boat are honest, unglamorous fish — northern pike, largemouth bass, rock bass, crappie, yellow perch, and bluegill thick enough on the spring beds to turn a bored kid into a fisherman in one afternoon. The chain is named, in part, for its dogfish. Bowfin. An armored holdover from an older, uglier draft of the food chain, a fish that hits like it took the whole thing personally. More of them make the state’s Master Angler book out of this water than any fish you would put on a postcard. Work the sunken islands and the stump edges. Bright spinnerbaits. A long attention span.

Getting on the water is the easy part. The state left you six public launches to argue over, and the two that matter most sit at the Tubbs Lake state forest campgrounds — a mainland loop and an island loop, 33 rustic sites split between them, roughly eight miles out of Barryton. Gravel ramps. Vault toilets. A fish-cleaning station that has smelled like a fish-cleaning station since Eisenhower. No reservations and no card reader — you fold cash or a check into the envelope, drop it in the iron pipe, and the honor system does the accounting. Miss the island turn and you land at the mainland loop, which is the better ramp anyway. Nobody minds.

Barryton itself is a few hundred people, a hardware store, a couple of bars, and a grocery that stops caring by evening. The chain is most of the reason the village is on a map at all. There is a joke in the fine print worth knowing before you sleep here: Winchester Dam, the structure that made every one of these lakes, is rated a significant-hazard dam — a state engineer’s way of noting that the town sits downstream. It has held since the fifties. It will probably hold through your weekend.

Come in late May or June if a full cooler of panfish is the point, when the bluegill and crappie push up shallow on the beds and a bobber outfishes anything clever. Come in October for the pike — colder water, fewer boats, the weed lines dying back until the fish stack up in the channels where you can find them. Either way you want a base with a floor you can leave wet and a dock you can tie a boat to overnight. one of our Michigan cabin rentals, Blue Ox Retreat, puts you close enough to the ramps to be on the water before the coffee cools, and a short run back into Barryton when the fish quit.

Fillet what you keep at the station by the ramp. Leave the rest for the herons. The pike smell was right.