MCA Featured Lake: Little Bass Lake, Irons, Michigan
Donald Transue, M.S., P.E.
Figure 1 - LITTLE BASS LAKE, IRONS, MI
The first Lake that the MCA is highlighting is Little Bass Lake in NW Lake County, Michigan. Just about 23 miles southeast of Manistee in Elk Twp., Little Bass Lake is an oligotrophic/mesotrophic lake and is 54 acres in area, is shaped like a kidney bean and has steep drop offs. Little Bass/Big Bass Lakes, as far as MCA are the only lakes with Ciscoes in Lake County. Little Bass has a marrow bottom and relatively clear water. Little Bass is spring fed and feeds, via a channel, the adjacent 290-acre Big Bass Lake. Many anglers tell stories of men back in the day ice fishing for Ciscoes and catching their limits in the winter months as well as large and abundant Northern Pike on Little Bass. Little Bass Lake is at 883’ MSL & is located at 44.089575 Latitude & -85.967227 Longitude.
Little Bass has mostly clear, blue water and most days there is hardly a chop on the surface as most of the shore hosts trees north of 40’. Little Bass Lake’s steep drop offs end up at about 30 to 35’ and there are about three areas that are greater than 45’ deep, see Figure 2.
Little Bass Lake is a private lake, however there is access via a channel to Big Bass Lake. Big Bass has a DNR landing. The channel between the two is about 12” deep, 7’ wide and there is a low bridge one must pull their boat under.
Big Bass Lake is mostly shallow under 20’, has some gravel bottom and is documented by the DNR to have Ciscoe fish in a 1982 net count by the USDA, see Figure 3. Our suspicion is Ciscoes travel through the channel to spawn on the gravel and stone or just infrequently end up there foraging for food. They are not common or fished for in Big Bass Lake.
The DNR also notes in the same report that Big Bass Lake is now more developed with lawns and shore destruction than most lakes in Michigan. I can attest that warm months have plenty of heavy and large boat traffic from the noise less than a mile away. MCA views this as a problem for the Cisco as new theories about the Ciscoes going up the channel to end up on Big Bass to spawn have come about in discussions with experts in the Cisco fish field
As the writer of this piece and the executive director of the MCA, I grew up on Little Bass Lake and our place is on the SW shore of Little Bass about 7 cottages up from the channel. Our board member Mike Whalen grew up and still owns a place on Big Bass Lake. Recent data by MSU monitoring of both lakes describe Little Bass as clean and healthy, but Big Bass as not clean and not as healthy of a lake compared to Little Bass.
Figure 2 - Little Bass Lake topo - usa.fishermap.org
The last 30 years Little Bass Lake has become more developed and less clear. Fishing for Ciscoes is more challenging in my experience and all the old timers on the lake affirm this observation. Most Ciscoes I have caught in my lifetime on Little Bass were 12” – 18”. This issue was the catalyst to start the MCA.
I have been on the lake since 1972 and in these last 30 years, about 6 new owners have bought shoreland and completely scraped the native trees and brush, altered the natural shoreline, and eliminated the natural scape of topography to install lawns.
There is an adjacent abandoned gravel mine to the NW of the lake. Most shoreline is still intact and there is a defining shallow flat lake bottom presence where these flats up to about 3 feet deep extend out to the drop off, in some places, 50’ from the shore.
There are few Pike in the lake, I seem to catch more than I used to and have become somewhat of a prolific Northern Pike angler on this lake in the fall months when Pike are on the winter feed. The Pike we caught the last 3-4 years were between 18” and 38”. A young man I met in 2020 told me he visited the lake the winter around 2018 and caught a 46” Pike thru the ice on a tip up. This confirms my agreement with experts that study these ecosystems; inland lakes with Ciscoes produce trophy predator fish. Here they are the Northern Pike.
Little Bass and Big Bass water quality reports from 2022 can be viewed here at this link:
DNR Table 2 2019 BBL report
DNR Fish Count Big Bass Lake
We hope to have an outing for Cisco fishing on Little Bass Lake in the next couple years with the MCA. Anyone interested should email me if they wish to visit this lake to fish sooner.