In the middle of nowhere

I often hear lake home and cottage owners say, “My lake is no good for fishing.” In fact, I heard such a person say that about an Upper Peninsula Michigan lake that is my all-time favorite and rarely if ever lets me down. Maybe people who say that are just using the old angler’s trick of keeping the mouth shut about a good spot. Or maybe they haven’t discovered the magic of something called the mid-lake hump.

Serious fisherman know about humps, of course. They’re also known as bars, reefs, or sunken islands. Call them what you will, they hold fish. If you see a boat parked out on your lake, away from shore, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, chances are that angler is working a hump. Novice fishermen, and even long-timers who never got serious, tend to fish along the shore, in the lily pads, around piers, or in fallen timber. Wisconsin guide and lure-maker Joe Bucher calls that tactic “bank beating.”

You can find fish in the shallows, of course, especially at early-season spawning time. But more often you’ll find more and bigger fish around deeper-water features, and one such feature is the mid-lake hump. How do you find humps? The easiest way to start is to buy a topographic map of your lake that shows the depths. That will give you the approximate locations of spots to try. If no map of your lake exists, then you have to go exploring. One good place to look is in an area well away from shore where you’ve seen people fishing.

With or without a map, you can pinpoint humps by prowling around slowly with your depth finder (fish locator) running. Before I owned one of those devices, I would find humps by rowing or motoring slowly with the anchor hanging down about 15 or 20 feet. When it hits a hump, you’ll know.

How do you fish a hump? It’s not difficult. You fish pretty much the way you would in a near-shore area. If the hump is shallow (say, five or six feet), you can cast spinners. If a little deeper (maybe 10 to 12 feet), throw deep-running crankbaits. Or in either case, you can hop jigs along the bottom, or cast slip-bobber rigs.

How good are humps? So good that once you know about them, you may give up “bank beating” for good. Just last month, on a small lake near our home (no, I’m not telling which one), I worked a hump I’ve known about for some 25 years. This hump, about 100 yards from the nearest shore, rises from 20 feet of water up to seven feet.

While people in three other boats worked the wood along shore, I anchored on the hump and cast leeches on a slip-bobber rig. In about three hours, I caught 12 smallmouth bass, plus 10 walleyes – eight of them easily legal size, and two of them well over 20 inches. I released all the bass and kept three of the smaller walleyes, which are now in my freezer awaiting a special occasion.

If you’ve been mostly a “bank beater” on your lake, try taking a day to find yourself a mid-lake hump. Once you do, you have a great place to take your kids. And you might never again have cause to say, “My lake is no good for fishing.”