Jeff Liskay: Great Lakes Fly Fishing for Steelhead and Smallmouth

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 708 with Jeff Liskay, owner and guide of Great Lakes Fly Fishing LLC, covering smallmouth bass, muskie, walleye, and steelhead fishing across Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair.

Jeff Liskay: Hey. This is Jeff Liskay, and this is a Tom Rowland podcast.

Tom Rowland: Alright, Jeff, man. How are you?

Jeff Liskay: Good. I'm doing good, Tom. Thanks for the invite, man.

Tom Rowland: You're welcome. You got a really, really good introduction. April Vokey said you're the best fisherman that she knows. That's pretty high praise.

Jeff Liskay: Yeah. I don't think that's the truth, but April's a wonderful gal, and we've had some time to spend together.

Tom Rowland: Well, you must have done something to impress her. Where you're fishing is interesting. That's one part of the country—not that I've fished in every part of the country, but certainly some parts way more than others—and the Great Lakes is a great mystery to me. I have never fished there. I know the fishing can be amazing for smallmouth bass and steelhead. Tell me what your program is up there.

Jeff Liskay: Yeah, so first off, you're gonna have to come up and sample it.

Tom Rowland: I know, I know. Now, with you up there, I have two reasons to come, because my friend Derek DeYoung, the artist, goes up there and has mentioned it a couple times and sent me some videos of the smallmouth bass he's catching. It just looks amazing, and I'm almost embarrassed I haven't been there. There's only so much time, I guess, but it's a part of the country I just haven't fished, and I really want to. So I'll take you up on it.

Jeff Liskay: Absolutely. It's not saltwater, but I'll say it's like the inland oceans. I've been doing it now for forty-plus years, and there are still places I haven't been. We've got the five Great Lakes, plus Lake St. Clair, which might as well be the sixth Great Lake. I started out first-mating, netting walleyes and smallmouth, and eventually switched over to the fly, though I still do a lot of light conventional gear fishing—however you want to play the game. If you want to go up and fish backcountry, sight-fish for bowfin and drum and smallmouth in eighteen inches of water on the flats, you can do that. You can go out deep and troll. But I live on the most fertile one of all—the south shore of Lake Erie.

Tom Rowland: Okay.

Jeff Liskay: We've got a huge population of walleyes, and migratory trout that are stocked—not wild, though a few wild ones run up the Canadian rivers. Between the tributaries in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, that's sort of my realm. I do get up to the Upper Peninsula in Michigan and explore, but the main lakes I stay on are Erie and Saint Clair.

Tom Rowland: What do you think makes your area the most fertile?

Jeff Liskay: Number one, it's shallow. Lake Erie isn't as shallow as Saint Clair, but it's still very shallow. There are only two places that are semi-deep—one right off Cleveland, Ohio, around eighty feet, and then off Long Point, Canada, near Erie, Pennsylvania, which is the deepest at only two hundred ten feet. So it's prolific—we've got areas for lake trout and cold-water species in the summer, but it's also a natural breeding ground for all the warm-water species. It's pretty unique.

Tom Rowland: And what's the fishing pressure like in your area?

Jeff Liskay: It's like every place else with good fish—highly pressured, especially for walleye.

Tom Rowland: You've got a couple of population centers nearby. I'd imagine you get a lot of boat traffic.

Jeff Liskay: We do, and I'll go on record that COVID and flex schedules added to that even more. But one unique thing about Lake Erie and all the Great Lakes is you can always find your own little piece of the world. We've got a huge population of bass anglers, professional and nonprofessional, a whole bunch of big, fast, glittery boats running around just like in saltwater. But I can always find my own little piece of the world during the day if I want to get away. I can play the game—go deep, go shallow. It's changing, though, and I'm sure your saltwater game is changing too. The fish are going a little more pelagic. They're not getting structure-oriented like they used to, but I'm still playing the game the old way while learning the new game too.

Great Lakes Fishing Through the Seasons

Tom Rowland: That's interesting. So how does your year shake out? You've got some cold weather up there—what does your fishing year look like?

Jeff Liskay: Okay, so right now we're in the fall run, starting around Halloween through the winter and into around Mother's Day in May. We have migratory rainbows running up the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York streams, so I'm guiding on that, but the boat isn't put away yet. With these milder temperatures—climate change, whatever you call it—Lake Erie is still running 42 degrees, so we're getting the big trophy walleye. You can cast crankbaits and flies or troll for them—trolling's more successful. We can still strip streamers off the river mouths for steelhead. I just got done musky fishing up on Saint Clair; we had to break some ice out in the morning and along the shorelines, but we're still running the big boats. Once spring comes, it's open game for anything that swims, because everything gets shallow to spawn. I stay away from the spawners—I don't fish the spawning smallmouth, but I fish the fringes, since nature is protecting them a little. Usually I start lake fishing around April once I'm off the rivers, and continue through midsummer into August. September is my tricky month—I can catch pretty much everything with a fly rod during the summer, but in September the water starts cooling and, before the lake turns over, I sometimes struggle. Then things fire right back up in October and November. September is when people want to go fishing because it's beautiful, but sometimes I struggle to get things going.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, it looked like you'd spent some time in Alaska. Is that a time you travel, since September's a tough month?

Jeff Liskay: Yeah, September is Jeff's month, because as a fishing guide I never fish—I pick up the rod maybe twice a year. That's how I met April, actually. I'll do a whole month up in British Columbia. We do Alaska, and we might do some Atlantic salmon. Now I'll also go up to the Nipigon River, way up north on Lake Superior, and look for good places to chase fish where our home fishery is a little slower.

Tom Rowland: And in Jeff's month, what kind of adventures have you found? All the BC stuff sounds amazing, but have you explored Alaska extensively, or where are you at with that?

Jeff Liskay: No, I love Alaska a lot, but I haven't explored it extensively—I stay at the same lodge, the same river. I basically fish the Bristol Bay area, on the Naknek River, and we usually swing flies for the big trophy rainbows after they finish feeding on sockeye eggs. They key in on big flesh flies—there's a lamprey pattern that scoots along the bottom—and it's just a huge trophy rainbow fishery when it hits the swung fly. I can't tell you how great a fishery that is.

Tom Rowland: That's interesting, swinging flies for them, because so much of the rainbow fishing I hear about in Alaska, and the little I've done myself, is egg fishing, which can be incredibly productive and you can catch some really big ones. But swinging flies is a little different. Are you swinging flesh flies, or other patterns? What does it look like when you're doing it?

Jeff Liskay: Yep, the go-to pattern for me has been a standard dark chocolate or black rabbit-strip leech, four and a half inches, imitating the small lamprey that scoots along the bottom. That's where the bigger fish—all the thirty-inch-plus fish we've caught—have come off that pattern. We also fish flesh flies—later in the season, once you start to see flesh hanging up in the trees, I'd never pull out of a run without fishing flesh if we hadn't gotten a grab. So we'll usually run the dark leech as the controlled fly, and have somebody else run a flesh fly before we leave the run, just to cover our bases.

Tom Rowland: So when you're getting bit on that rabbit-strip fly, are there a lot of fish in the river actively dropping eggs at that time?

Jeff Liskay: No—the bite you're experiencing is the sockeye egg bite, by the millions. Those fish get in behind the big gravel bars where the sockeye are spawning, and you can't swing for them because they're just gobbling eggs. But there's a window, about a week after the egg conveyor belt stops, when those fish go on the hunt. The later you can push the season, the better—right into November if it doesn't get too nasty. That bite usually starts slowing down in September as the sockeye finish spawning, but give or take, the best window I've had is October for the big leech bite.

September Travels and the Search for New Water

Tom Rowland: That sounds awesome. September is kind of my month too, because it's a good hunting month—I go out west and hunt with my boys, elk hunting and archery. I'm a newbie at it, but it's very addictive, just like fly fishing. Are there other places on your list you want to go? Do you gravitate toward that same area, or would you rather chase warm water in September if you had the choice?

Jeff Liskay: There are areas on the Great Lakes I explore in September, when the water temperature is changing—the eastern end of Lake Erie, where the fish start gathering back up over the Pennsylvania side. But I'll say I'm obsessed with figuring out the suspended smallmouth game. It's not easy with a fly rod, which is part of why it gravitates to me. With forward-facing sonar now, I can chase them down in forty feet of water—mark bait, mark the fish, chase them down—but it's not that easy with the fly. A lot of times it comes down to the vertical speed drop of the lure, which I can't mimic with a fly. I'm still working through that. So that's been my main focus—working my home waters and fine-tuning how these fish are adjusting to their changing ecosystem.

Chasing Suspended Smallmouth with Forward-Facing Sonar

Tom Rowland: When spin anglers and conventional anglers are targeting those fish, what's the most effective way—drop-shotting, or something else?

Jeff Liskay: Most of the time they're throwing three-quarter-ounce paddle tails and counting them down. Even in twenty-something feet of water, we can count it down six, eight, ten, and slow-roll it in. If the water's a little warmer, we'll snap-jig it in, but that's usually the go-to. If you can get them structure-oriented, there are two types of fishing: one is that roly-poly bottom structure where fish roam in deeper water looking for baitfish and gobies—that's the drop-shot bite. But once you get a pile of bait and those fish up off the bottom, it's a whole other world—fast and furious action.

Tom Rowland: And then you're trying to mimic with a fly what's working on a spinning rod. What kind of depth do you need to reach with the fly?

Jeff Liskay: I can get to thirty feet. The problem with a sinking line—I use around a twenty-five-foot tungsten sinking shooting head—is you need distance for it to work. You have to be a fairly skilled angler, just like tarpon fishing in saltwater. It's not about accuracy so much as being able to cast seventy feet all day, which gives the line time to sink. It's like a pie chart of your cast—it might take two-thirds of that window just to get the fly down, leaving only a third of the window to strip it, whereas with gear you can get it down a quarter of the way through the retrieve and start ripping it through. So I'm managing that, but the vertical speed drop has really been a struggle, because the fastest vertical drop usually comes from a floating line with a super heavy fly. I've been using the same tungsten shooting heads but running super long, twelve-foot leaders with super heavy flies, and that's been working for muskie, walleye, and smallmouth to get the reaction bite I couldn't get with a standard neutral-buoyancy, walk-the-dog style fly.

Targeting Muskie on the Fly

Tom Rowland: Now tell me about the muskie. When you're in good, productive muskie water and want a shot at one, are you using wire, or going without?

Jeff Liskay: It's a wire game—about a four- to five-foot leader, with ten to twelve inches of bite wire, whatever you prefer. The secret is running forty- or fifty-pound mono up to a bite section with a swivel, nothing different than a gear rod. The difference with the fly rod is that when we come to the boat for the figure-eight or boatside maneuver, we want to strip that leader right to the wire, keeping the fly within a foot or two of the rod tip so we can work it like a lure. We'll put a bit of AquaSeal, or a piece of shrink tubing, where the leader meets the fly line, so I can strip fast without that connection knocking through the guides. Then I make the boatside maneuver and keep casting. Our season opens June 1st on Lake St. Clair, and the fishing stays within our realm through May and June, but all summer long the majority of the best muskie fishing is on the Canadian side of Lake Saint Clair, around eighteen to twenty-one feet, with the fish suspended. It's a distance game—pretty long casts, with long days to get them to go.

Tom Rowland: Some of the people I know who chase muskie a lot are using Lowrance Active Target and forward-facing sonar, which you mentioned you have too. But you also said there are a lot of weeds there—can you still use it for muskie in those suspended situations, or do the weeds interfere?

Jeff Liskay: No—there's one big predominant weed bed on the Canadian side, and then some sporadic weeds coming up off the bottom. The interesting thing is that when you're marking fish on the sonar, it took a while to figure out the ones closer to the top of the weeds are giant channel catfish, and the muskies are usually above them. You've got to have bait nearby, like any big predator. A lot of the big trolling boats run multiple lines along the edges, because they don't want ten or twelve lines tangled in the weeds. So the fly guys—there are only a handful of us—concentrate in the areas the trollers can't quite get into, which gives us a bit of an advantage. Mainly it comes down to distance: can you get it out there, and keep the fly in the water? And even there, it's a vertical speed drop thing. You know how they throw those big rubber pounder baits?

Tom Rowland: Yeah.

Jeff Liskay: Our flies can be that big, but we can't get them to drop as fast, so it's more of an upward strip. I've been playing around with adding egg sinkers right up in front of the fly—if I get a follow, I'll do a running-line egg-sinker trick, hawk it out there, do the strip-rip, and it plunges quickly. You can get a grab on that too. It's a learning process.

Innovations in Rods, Lines, and Sonar

Tom Rowland: Over the years you've been doing this, how much has your fly fishing changed compared to just a few years ago? Rod technology, reel technology, and especially these sinking lines are a big advancement over what we had not that long ago. Do you see this as a frontier—learning to use forward-facing sonar, new heavier sinking lines, new flies—or do you feel like we're maxed out on what the fly rod can do?

Jeff Liskay: I don't think we're maxed out, and I'm by no means a master of it. There's a guy, Eric Dragewski, who's pretty much full-time muskie on the fly up there, with a lot of conventional gear background too. And Brian Mazaros, who I bought my guiding business from, was one of the founders of chasing muskie on the fly up there. They were using similar lines, but now with sonar technology I've got this burning need to stay on the cutting edge—always feeling like I could do better than I'm doing. That's where these new lines come in—it's really a payload delivery system. You've got an eleven-, twelve-, fourteen-inch fly that's less about weight and more about wind resistance, paired with a fly line in the 500- to 550-grain range that's not quite enough to deliver that payload easily. The tricky part is the shooting line behind the head—too thin and it tangles, especially with temperature changes, just like you guys deal with your cores in saltwater. I carry two cores—a cold core for the mornings, and a tropical core for when things get hot and the line's baking on the deck near ninety degrees. I run all Scientific Anglers products, and it's been a good relationship—trying things out and seeing what works.

Tom Rowland: And the material inside—solid core or braided core?

Jeff Liskay: Braided core is the warmer one, solid core is the colder one. The cool thing about braided cores is you get about thirty percent more strength once the fly line coating incorporates with that braided core—it gets super strong. So if you're normally running a fifty-pound core, you could probably test it out at seventy pounds.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that was a big problem not long ago when people started fishing for arapaima—lines were breaking left and right. They've gotten a lot stronger when it matters, though not all of them. That's interesting. The muskie is definitely of interest to me—I don't have a lot of experience with them, but I just caught my first one the other day bait fishing, and it was really cool. I love it—it's right up my alley, a predator fish, like barracuda or sharks or wahoo, things that just eat other things. The muskie is like that in freshwater, and they're huge too. You've got a visitor?

Jeff Liskay: Okay, I'm gonna step away for a second—I've got a package that needs to get signed for.

Tom Rowland: Can't do that. Christmas time.

Jeff Liskay: What are the odds of a package showing up right when you're doing the podcast?

Tom Rowland: Yeah, so what do you intend to do with that?

Jeff Liskay: Add more toys to the boat.

Tom Rowland: Do you have room for more? How is your boat set up? I'd guess you have some dash-mounted electronics, and then probably another unit up by the trolling motor like a typical bass boat, plus a unit by the big motor like a lot of walleye guys run. So how do you have your electronics set up for fly fishing, since they can be real fly-line magnets depending on how they're managed?

Jeff Liskay: They are. I do think there's a big difference in Garmin's forward-facing sonar technology, but I run Humminbird up front because it links in with my Minn Kota. The Humminbird up front ties into the Minn Kota, which has 360 and side-view scanning. Then I have two more Humminbirds on the dash—one for GPS, one for depth—and one on the stern by the motor for trolling. One of the dash units is going away in favor of Garmin, and I'll use an over-the-side mount so I can drop the forward-facing transducer off the side for muskie fishing, or bring it up front on a track mount so I can move it around. A lot of times I'm fishing downwind, and it's important to get the fly or bait to the fish before the boat does. I'm not stealthy like a saltwater flats boat—I can't just kick on the trolling motor, and I don't run Power-Poles, which would just be another fly-line magnet. So my go-to is to idle into the wind and stay on the bow. Since most dominant fly casters are right-handed, I usually put them in the back corner of the boat, where there's less to catch the line on, and run the big electronics up front so I can touch-screen it myself—bump over if I see something interesting, or swing the live sonar over and say, there are fish, they're moving toward the fly. I stay on the bow and adjust boat speed to the species: for muskie, around three-quarters of a mile an hour to cover water; for smallmouth, maybe half a mile an hour, sometimes point-six if I want to be power efficient; for drum or more lethargic fish, I'll drop down to around point-four, just to keep a little pace going with the motor.

Tom Rowland: And those paces are mainly for fly fishing—that's the pace you like to cover water with?

Jeff Liskay: Right. It gives the fly a chance to get down. The issue with fly versus gear is that the fly's movement depends on the angler's stripping cadence, so I need the boat moving a little to keep the fly alive during the angler's pause. If I just spot-lock the boat, I don't do as well, because when the angler pauses, the fish come up and realize it's not real. But if the boat keeps moving a bit, the fly still has some motion during that pause, and I feel like we do better when the boat's always moving.

Tom Rowland: How would those paces change with really good spin casters on board—say, pro bass guys?

Jeff Liskay: Substantially faster. With gear guys power-fishing the top of the flats—say, in August, throwing square-bills, pounding the shallows for those dominant four-, five-, six-pound smallmouth—I'd have to slow down with the fly, or you couldn't stay in the zone long enough. I do move fast with the fly rod too, but I could pick the pace up a couple notches with gear guys because I know they can handle the faster angle of attack.

Tom Rowland: Right, and they can cover water so much faster—once you throw seventy feet of fly line out and let it sink, you're kind of committed for a bit before you can make a second cast, whereas with a spinning rod and a fast retrieve ratio, you're zipping it back in and casting again right away. We do a lot of different kinds of fishing in the Florida Keys—fly, spin, bait—and some guys want to be all fly, while others just want to catch fish whichever way is most productive that day. Typically those all-around guys win most of the tournaments. But it's interesting talking to you, because the Great Lakes has all of it—fly, spin, and lures.

Fly Fishing Versus Conventional Gear

Tom Rowland: Is there a big drop-off if someone wants to fly fish under conditions where gear guys would clearly catch a lot more? Or are there situations where fly anglers can do just as well, if not better?

Jeff Liskay: Great question. At the same skill level, I think there are times fly has an advantage—like a bass tournament angler working down a bank who isn't the only one working that bank. We're throwing something the fish haven't seen. During peak season I might see thirty or forty bass boats all drop-shotting and catching a few fish, and I'll come in behind them and start making some really good catches with the fly. But in general, I'd still say the spin angler has a bit of an advantage. That said, I run four, five, six fly rods rigged differently so I can mimic almost everything a gear guy can do—pop it, fish an intermediate line, walk the dog, jig it, throw a heavy fly. If their casting is good, it's not quite as effective as gear, but I'd still highly encourage people to try it. It's pretty cool to run a spot with gear first, mark and locate the fish, then come back through with the fly and watch people say, wow, look at this.

Tom Rowland: That seems like the most productive approach. Growing up bass fishing in Tennessee and wanting to catch them on fly, that's kind of what I did—without today's electronics, in my little johnboat, I'd make a few casts, get a couple bites, and then try to mimic whatever lure was working. I wasn't really fishing so much as figuring out what fly would match that lure, and sure enough I'd catch them, because other anglers had already done the work of figuring out what the fish were biting. Later, as I got better, I started thinking less about imitating lures and more about what actually lived in the lake—hellgrammites, nymphs, small fish—and tying flies to match that, kind of like trout fishing, trying to match what they're actually eating. Bass are curious, though, and eat all kinds of things that don't necessarily look like anything in the lake. So how much do you go back and forth between imitating lures versus imitating what's actually in the water when you're targeting fish on fly?

Jeff Liskay: It's fly-rod research built on conventional gear first. I always use conventional gear to locate active fish, because it's much easier to catch active fish than static ones. So with drop-shotting, I'll run a heavy jig fly, then come up about eighteen inches and add another fly. One drawback with something like a hellgrammite pattern is there are really only two ways to fish it—creepy-crawl it slow on the bottom, or strip it fast like baitfish for a reaction bite. If those fish aren't up off the bottom, a lot of fly anglers default to stripping fast like a trout-streamer angler, but that won't produce—you have to slow way down, almost hand-walk the fly, give the fish time to come look at it, pause, jiggle it like a shaky head, and that might be the ticket for the day. Other times the fish are up and moving, and it's a different game entirely. I also watch belly color closely—whether it's an orange, white, or chartreuse belly—thinking about what the fish see from underneath as the fly or crankbait comes through, using the same color logic I'd apply to crankbaits, and generally matching whatever's on the bottom.

Tom Rowland: We've talked a lot about innovations, especially electronics, but the type of fishing you do seems very gear-intensive compared to something like spring-creek trout fishing—getting down deep with all kinds of tackle, spin, gear, and fly. What would you say is the single innovation over the last twenty years that's changed your fishing the most?

Jeff Liskay: I'd say three things. One is synthetic materials for fly tying that shed water quickly on the cast. The flash materials have also improved—instead of the old in-your-face flash, these newer body flashes give a subtler flash that's helped a lot. Second is the durability and tapers of modern fly lines, which let an average caster perform better—we used to struggle with sixty-foot heads that demanded a really good caster, and now that's shortened to twenty-five or thirty feet max. Third, of course, is the electronics. It's not that they make fish bite, but being able to see a fish's disposition is huge—before, I'd just see suspended fish on structure and have to fish blind, not knowing if they were moving toward my bait. Now I can tell if they're starting to move in, or not moving at all, and decide whether to keep working them or move on. Those are my three big ones.

Forward-Facing Sonar in Freshwater and Saltwater

Tom Rowland: We use Lowrance ActiveTarget, and we're still learning to use it better and better. With tarpon it's pretty easy, since a tarpon shows up as a big, clear image—you can see the fork of the tail—versus small baitfish, which are just little dots. When it's dialed in just right, it almost looks like a photograph, and you can see the bait or fly approaching the fish, and sometimes see the fish part and swim away from it. Before this technology, we'd just see a snapshot of a big pile of fish, drop a bait in, and wonder why we weren't getting bit—now we can actually see the fish part and reject the bait. We've gotten to the point where we can tell they're seeing the leader, or seeing something, and just don't want the bait near them. Before, you'd have no way to know that and might just think you were being impatient. But seeing it happen—a fish rushing toward the bait, stopping, backing off—tells you that something got its attention, but something else also made it turn away. I think that's really changing the game, and you Great Lakes guys using this daily are ahead of where we are in saltwater. It's not going to make fish bite, but it lets us eliminate unproductive spots much faster, since before we had no way of knowing fish weren't moving for our bait at all. I think this technology is only going to get better and work at greater range over time.

Jeff Liskay: Oh my god, yeah—as soon as you buy something in this space it's already old news, because they're already working on the next thing. But hey, can you see live bait on it?

Tom Rowland: Oh, yeah.

Jeff Liskay: I don't fish bait much—you can actually see the bait moving?

Tom Rowland: Oh, for sure. Especially something like a pinfish, you can see it moving clearly, just like bass fishermen watching their lure get eaten on screen. In fact, when we caught that muskie recently, we were using a big skipjack herring as bait, and we could see a fish come up underneath it, then turn off without eating it. That raises the question of when to decide to move—when you keep seeing fish rush up and turn away, sooner or later one of them usually commits. In that case we stuck it out, and even though we didn't actually see the fish that ultimately ate it on the sonar, since it wasn't pointed the right direction at that exact moment, we'd seen enough activity to feel confident staying put. That day we were actually targeting stripers and got completely blanked on them, but kept seeing muskie come up on the skipjack without committing, so we stuck it out another hour and ended up landing one—which we probably wouldn't have without the electronics telling us fish were still interested. A lot of times I use it more to know when to leave a known spot, like a bridge where tarpon are supposed to be, rather than to find new fish, since I already know they'll generally be there at the right time of year. But you can see where they're stacked up thicker, and watch how they react as bait moves through, which tells you a lot. We also use it constantly in muddy water—watching schools of mullet "mudding" on the bottom, figuring out whether they're feeding actively nearby, then throwing the cast net right on top of them instead of guessing from surface activity alone. It's like putting on polarized sunglasses for the first time—suddenly you can see fish that were always there but invisible before. What we're doing with it is still pretty basic compared to how far the pro bass tournament anglers have taken it.

Jeff Liskay: Yeah, it's a huge advantage. Do you ever throw artificial lures to get fish fired up, then let them find the real bait instead, almost like a hide-and-seek trick?

Tom Rowland: We'll do that for some species, but more often it's the other way around—live chumming with pilchards, which are our favorite chum bait. You fill the well with small pilchards and start throwing them out to get fish fired up, even bringing something like tuna up from two hundred feet to the surface where you can then present a fly. That opens up species that would otherwise be totally inaccessible to a fly angler. Guys like Ralph Delph and Robert Trosset really pioneered that style of fishing, marking big schools deep, chumming them to the surface with pilchards. It's really cool. In that muskie situation I mentioned, the fishing was so slow that day that a skipjack herring bait ended up doing most of the work just by swimming around and covering a lot of water on its own—it's about as hardy and hard-pulling a bait as there is. A friend I fish with, who goes by Melton Hill Bill, always says the fish hate skipjack—they don't want them around, so they'll swipe at and kill them even if they don't necessarily eat them, which is true of both muskie and striper. Both of those predators are large enough to mark well on the sonar, so he's learned to use that to his advantage, and it sounds like you're doing the same up there.

Jeff Liskay: Trying to. How do you deal with fish that aren't outright negative, just neutral and static—tough, dense stripers, say—where you have to change your whole game plan? How do you normally adjust when you've got a genuinely bad day going and need to pull a rabbit out of the hat?

Jeff Liskay: That's where I think this technology helps, along with just learning as you go—trying a technique you might never have stumbled onto otherwise. Have you ever heard of long-line cranking?

Tom Rowland: I don't think I know what that is. What is it?

Jeff Liskay: Since trolling a crankbait isn't allowed in some tournaments, anglers make a long cast, engage the reel, and then use the trolling motor to pull away from the bait, essentially cranking it down to depth over a hundred feet of separation before really working it. I've adapted that a bit with fly anglers who are more trout-oriented than predator-fish anglers—I'll have them cast out, then move the boat thirty or forty yards away before having them engage and strip, which lets me control both the distance covered and the depth reached to match their skill level. That's been my way of salvaging tough days—I think the biggest challenge as a guide is when a client's skill set and their expectations don't line up.

Tom Rowland: Very good—that should be a T-shirt.

Jeff Liskay: Go for it.

Managing Tough Days and Client Expectations

Tom Rowland: That should be a T-shirt. My next question was along those lines—you've been guiding a long time, and it's one thing to come up with these techniques yourself, but between two guides here, how do you keep someone engaged on a tough day? Any tricks for turning a bad day into a good one and keeping people willing to try new things, so maybe you salvage a couple fish that make the day?

Jeff Liskay: Right, the first thing with a fly angler is that fatigue sets in, so if they're not a purist, I'll ask them to pick up a conventional rod and reel, because we only have so many bite windows before conditions change. I don't want them worn out when it's actually time to perform, so I'll suggest we eat, troll some lines, catch a few fish, and re-engage the fly game once everyone's ready. Fatigue really is the hardest part of a successful day with a fly angler in freshwater, since we're not making a handful of precise casts at sighted fish—we're making hundreds of casts a day, sometimes twenty minutes between real shots. If someone won't pick up conventional gear, I'll head into the backcountry, let them decompress, get into skinny water, sight-fish with floating lines or poppers, and pick up largemouth or panfish just to break the grind and boost morale before going back after our real target—sort of like you guys mixing in striper action around muskie trips. I hate to admit it, but a guide's report card is ultimately whether the client caught a fish, and we're entertainers who can only tell so many stories. So I always try to have a Plan B, C, and D lined up before I even leave the dock—some days I'm down to D.

Tom Rowland: For sure. Do you have general priorities heading out with a new client, regardless of whether they're a fly guy or a spin guy?

Jeff Liskay: I do. First, I always evaluate their skill set—usually in some protected water close to the dock, at a few spots I use specifically to gauge their spinning, casting, or fly-rod ability, and whether they can safely stand on the deck. Once I know their skill level, I start turning up the difficulty, and if they can handle it, I keep pushing; if they start to struggle, I can always dial it back. Safety always factors in too—if I need to, I'll tuck into a protected bay and fish the lee side to still get the job done. I have milk runs just like you do—A spots and B spots—but sometimes skill level dictates where we can actually go. I'm always thinking ahead about where I want to fish versus where we might have to fish, plus things like whether someone gets seasick. You deal with far more variable weather than I do, though—daily thunderstorms and big, choppy water that builds fast. I watch wind forecasts closely using an app called Windy, and I make a point of showing clients the depth finder and explaining why we're fishing a particular spot or structure, which keeps them engaged as an active participant rather than just aimlessly casting.

Tom Rowland: That's a good point. You're walking a finer line than a lot of guides who are strictly all-fly or don't touch a fly rod at all. How do you handle it when someone doesn't have the skill to catch fish that are clearly biting, and picking up a spinning rod would solve everything instantly? We run into that in saltwater too—someone's booked a whole week chasing tarpon on fly, it's day four with no results, and they're so nervous about the pressure they've put on themselves that they can barely function. I've seen it go both ways: sometimes sticking with the fly pays off, and sometimes suggesting they catch one on spin first breaks the tension completely and they go on to succeed on fly right after. But I've also seen people get genuinely offended at the suggestion. Do you run into that, and how do you navigate it?

Jeff Liskay: Absolutely, I navigate that all the time. I usually tell clients up front, half-joking, that if I went out with you, Tom, I'd want to hit the bait shop first, because I'd probably fall apart trying to fly fish for something like that myself. If we can do it on the fly, great; if I mess it up, you tell me to grab a spinning rod, and I will, no ego about it. I try to set that expectation early, especially since my boat's only twenty-two feet with twenty-some rods rigged and ready. I think fly anglers generally come in with lower expectations than someone chasing one pedestal fish like a tarpon—they're more focused on improving skill, so landing four or five smallmouth, missing a couple of good shots at carp because the fly landed on top of the fish, and boating a nice drum can add up to a great day, compared to trolling up twenty smallmouth on gear. If someone still won't pick up a spinning rod, my fallback is a straight running line with a half-ounce egg sinker above a swivel and the same fly tied on—basically a Michigan chuck-and-duck rig—so we're still using a fly reel, can punch through wind, get down to the fish, and still strip the fly in. It's not quite saltwater conventional gear, but it bridges the gap and it works.

Tom Rowland: That reminds me of trying to catch permit on fly early on—I used to think every fish caught on spin was one you might have caught on fly if you'd stuck with it, so I'd avoid switching. Looking back, I probably wasted too much time being stubborn, since building experience on any tackle, spin or fly, eventually pays off across the board—my knees still knock a little seeing a permit, even now, just less than they used to. So we always debated whether to suggest the spinning rod, and people have strong opinions both ways—some say get one on spin immediately to relieve the pressure, then spend the rest of the week chasing one on fly; others say go all-in on fly the entire trip and never look back. I lean toward committing fully one way or the other rather than trying to catch one on spin only at the very end.

The Underappreciated Drum

Tom Rowland: Looking at your Instagram, I noticed you post a lot about drum. Let's close out with that—it seems like a species that doesn't get much respect, but you clearly enjoy targeting them. What's the drum fishery like up there, and how available are they?

Jeff Liskay: The poor drum gets treated like trash by a lot of anglers—tossed aside as bycatch on the bottom of the boat.

Tom Rowland: That term always throws me, honestly.

Jeff Liskay: Me too, but that's what people call them. In my book, though, drum are the saving grace of a slow spin-fishing day—they're everywhere, shallow or deep, and they fight incredibly hard. On the fly, people assume they're strictly bottom feeders because of their downward-set mouth, but until the water hits about seventy-eight degrees, big schools of drum actually hold up in the top of the water column, sometimes ten to fifteen pounds, and they'll eat a simple fly readily. You can land six, eight, ten of them in a day without much trouble, all fighting hard. That makes them a real saving grace—I can tell a client, let's go find some drum, and mix in some bass and carp along the way. Honestly, if I brought you up here, going after drum first thing might be exactly how we'd start the day.

Tom Rowland: That sounds a lot like our jack crevalle down here—everybody loves a fish that hits hard and fights well, right up until they catch too many, and then people act like they don't want to see them anymore. I don't fully understand that mindset, honestly, because those fish save more slow days than anything else. And ironically, if you specifically go out looking for jack crevalle on a day you actually want them, they can be surprisingly hard to find, even though you'll stumble into huge schools on days you're targeting something else entirely.

Jeff Liskay: Absolutely, every time.

Wrapping Up

Tom Rowland: Jeff, you seem like a great guy to spend a day in the boat with in April—definitely didn't steer me wrong going into this. How can people book a day on the water with you?

Jeff Liskay: Just head to the Great Lakes Fly Fishing LLC website—there are multiple ways to reach me there, by email or phone, and we can work out the details. If you're up visiting the Great Lakes area for any reason, reach out—I'd love to get you out on the water, and that includes you too, Tom.

Tom Rowland: I'd love that, and I really will make it up there. Of all the parts of the country, that's the one I just haven't fished, and I want to change that. I've got a couple friends up there already, and now a new friend in you, so we'll make it happen.

Jeff Liskay: Perfect.

Tom Rowland: Alright, good luck to you, and thanks for doing the show. Send me some pictures of what people catch when they book with you—I'm sure it'll be awesome. Thanks, Jeff, and we'll be back next week with another great guest. See you.