There was a slot on river left between a coffee table-sized submerged rock and a half-submerged log lying parallel to shore—one of those spots that cries out to be cast to. I was in the stern of Tim Landwehr’s drift boat—my friend Peter Corbin, the eminent sporting artist, was in the bow—so I took a backhand shot and got lucky. The electric blue BoogleBug landed softly in the seam a few feet above the slot.

I let it ride, twitched it ever so slightly just as it entered the sweet spot … and a smallmouth bass absolutely smoked it, threshing the water, throwing spray, and generally leaving no doubt as to the murderous nature of his intentions. I tend to get a little excited by violent topwater eats, and my involuntary response to this one was to blurt out an epithet I use so infrequently I was surprised to hear it coming from my own lips.

You know what they say, though: What happens on the Menominee River stays on the Menominee River.

Something else they say, “they” in this case being anglers who’ve fished smallmouth in enough places to constitute a representative sample size, is that the Menominee River’s fish are simply on a different level. Tim had warned us that even by Menominee standards the bass were fighting like cornered pumas, and the one I was attached to was proving the point. He wasn’t an especially big fish, 15 inches or so, but he was angry, and his reserves of strength and stamina were astonishing. It was all I could do to keep him out of the logs on the bottom of the river—and I was using a 7-weight. When Tim finally slid the net under him, my principal feeling was relief.

After the release, he turned to me with a grin and, in what’s become a standing joke between us, cracked “Don’t you wish you’d brought a 5-weight?”

There are sports who do, perplexingly, but it takes about one hook-up for them to figure out that they’re fatally undergunned. Bringing a 5- or even 6-weight rod to the Menominee River is like hunting elephants with a .22.

The discovery and development of the Menominee River smallmouth fishery by Tim Landwehr, his cousin Bart Landwehr, and the rest of the staff of the Tight Lines Fly Fishing Co. has turned tiny Pembine, Wisconsin—one of those down-at-heel old logging towns scattered forlornly across the North Country—into perhaps the unlikeliest fly-fishing destination in the United States. The Tight Lines “guide shack,” fittingly, is a converted two-story, 1930s-vintage ranger station set among tall white pines; the collection of drift boats and jet boats parked out front when the fleet is “in” is about as unexpected, in that geocultural context, as a Ferrari dealership.

Conveniently, the local one-stop shopping center, Dollar General, is right next door. It carries a surprisingly robust selection of frozen pizzas, as Peter and I discovered when we decided that that was a more attractive dinner option than the one restaurant in town that’s open at night. (The other restaurant, a cash-only operation that’s popular for breakfast, closes at 2 p.m.) The price for the pizza, which wasn’t bad at all, was a whopping $6.75.

The rate for a standard room at the Grand, the clean but modest motel at the junction of highways 8 and 141 where most of Tight Lines’ clients bed down, is $49 per night. If you spring for a kitchenette, the rate jumps to $79.

Photo: Tom Davis.

Welcome to northern Wisconsin. As I remarked to Peter—whose customary “beat” is Atlantic salmon camps and bonefish/permit lodges—a trip to the Menominee River has to be the biggest bargain in the universe of guided fly-fishing. He didn’t disagree.

Just FYI, the tariff for a day on the Menominee with Tight Lines is $600. This includes lunch, snacks, and soft drinks, also cleaning your fish and packaging the filets for the trip home.

That last part is a joke, in case you're wondering.

In point of fact, recognizing that as catch-and-release fly-fishing guides with funny boats they’re outliers and objects of curiosity (if not downright suspicion), Tim and his crew have worked hard to cultivate goodwill and bonhomie in the community. That they’ve succeeded in this is reflected by the number of passersby who honked and waved as we stood in front of the ranger station one evening, drinking beer and recapping the day’s action.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that, this being Wisconsin, they would have honked and waved at anyone drinking beer.

I’ve fished the Menominee with Tim for 20-plus years now, and in that time we’ve concluded that we’re (A) brothers from different mothers and (B) married to the same infinitely patient, tolerant, good-humored woman. Thankfully, our juvenile patter, larded with low humor and obscure pop culture references, kept Peter amused when he wasn’t fighting fish. The hijinks began with our traditional Shotgun Start: The moment Tim pushed the drift boat away from shore, I lit a firecracker with a waterproof fuse and dropped it into the drink. The muffled whump was deeply satisfying.

In fairness to Tim, though, he has a lot more chutzpah than I do. This is a man who, back when such things were possible, traded double-haul lessons for a vasectomy. From an actual urologist!

Back to the matters at hand, I’ve seen Tim’s approach to fly selection and presentation change considerably over the years. He’s gotten progressively more surface-oriented, for one thing, having learned that topwater presentations are often the more productive option (in addition to being the more exciting one); for another thing, he’s gone to smaller flies, his go-tos in this respect being Ol’ Mister Wiggly, a riff on the Chernobyl Ant that’s taken the smallmouth world by storm in the past few years, and the BoogleBug, a versatile, uber-durable cork popper.

His favorite way to present these flies, in turn, can be summed up in the immortal words of Bachman-Turner Overdrive: Let it ride. You cast on a downstream angle to the target (easier for the guy in the bow, obviously), move the fly just enough to let the fish know it’s alive (although if you’re using a Boogle you can give it a quiet pop), then let it ride at what Tim calls “walking speed.” It’s effective as hell, especially in low water and/or when the fish are holding in shallower lies, and the eats can be shockingly subtle.

The Wiggly eat, in particular, is typically a sip. If you can even call it that: Sometimes, the fly simply disappears. One moment it’s there, the next it’s gone, with no audible sound and about as much visible disturbance as a bubble breaking.

This approach demands a lot more finesse than the traditional chuck-out-a-popper-and-glug-it-back-to-the-boat approach (which, let there be no mistake, still slays when the fish are feeding aggressively), but when it works it’s a thing of beauty. The coolest example I’ve ever seen happened a year ago, on the first occasion I was able to pry Peter away from his beloved salmon rivers to fish the Menominee with Tim and me. It was around four in the afternoon on a spectacularly beautiful day, we were fishing river left—the Michigan side—and Peter was in the bow.

Having done somewhere north of 2,000 guide trips at this point, Tim’s knowledge of where the Menominee’s bass are likely to be, and how best to present a fly to them, borders on the supernatural. Now, he instructed Peter very specifically to shoot his Wiggly beneath a certain overhanging limb (child’s play for a caster of Peter’s ability); to let the current slowly carry it toward a half-submerged log extending from the bank at a 45-degree downstream angle; and, when it was about four feet from the log, to give it a single gentle twitch.

“Just enough to bend the legs,” he said.

Peter carried out his instructions to perfection. A moment after he twitched the Wiggly, it disappeared—and he came tight to a bass that was not only large, but severely pissed off. Several nervy minutes later, Tim slid the net beneath a gorgeous, deep-bodied 19½-inch Menominee River smallmouth—a trophy in anyone’s book.

I thought that that deserved a celebration, and it just so happened that I had a pint of Elijah Craig bourbon in my boat bag. It pays to come prepared, you know?

Anyway, you can understand why Peter was pumped about coming back this year and spending three days on the Menominee instead of one. While he didn’t land another 19½-incher—although he stung one that was clearly in that same class—I’m pretty sure he didn’t go home disappointed. He was casting an electric blue Boogle toward the bank one afternoon when it landed on an overhanging limb. It didn’t loopity-loop, though, and when Peter gave it a little pull it fell straight down.

A smallmouth crushed it the instant it hit the water, eliciting one of my trademark verbal ejaculations. Peter couldn’t stick the fish, alas, but at Tim’s urging he shot another cast to the same spot. Pow! Another slamming hit, but another missed strike. Could cast number three be the charm?

Amazingly, unbelievably, it was. Ride, ride, ride, let it ride …