Lily pad lakes

[BNL]

I was driving home from work yesterday, thinking about fishing (as I often do) and I started thinking about lily pad fishing.  I drive home on the M-5 connector in Oakland county and there are punch of swampy shallow lakes /drainage areas along this road and they are full of lily pads amd stumps!

I always think about bringing a rod with me to work to fish some of these marshy areas on the way home. Would these type of marsh/lake/drainage areas have bass in them? Any one ever stop and fish something like this from the shore?

And on the topic of lily pads, are there any southeast Michigan lakes with really good lily pad fields? Especially deep water pads? Or really extensive lily pads fields that I could spend hours fishing on a single lake?

Look forward to hearing some people's thoughts on lily pad fishing in my area!

Thanks

[Got Fish??]

Get your self a 7ft heavy action rod and 50lb test  braid.line. go have  at it!

[djkimmel]

If a body of water isn't too shallow and limited where it will suffer winter kill or not have enough oxygen with some water exchange, it could hold some bass. There aren't too many water bodies in Michigan that don't have some bass.

Some of the better pad fishing I've experienced has been on lakes that have a bunch of small, isolated patches around that don't get targeted very often. Many lakes in SE Michigan have this. If the lake is real weedy, many bass will live in and around the other weeds but due to the way many pad fields grow, they usually attract some bass. If the lake only has real shallow pads, there's probably still some bass that use them.

Look for bigger lakes with several small bays, pockets, channels or canals, or even other small connected lakes. I'm not sure of lakes where you can fish pads all day in SE Michigan - I haven't been on many of the smaller, more eutrophic lakes. I know East of there are some lake chains that might work - such as Portage Chain near Pinckney. It's been awhile since I've been there but many of the little lakes in the chain had larger pad fields. Lodbell, Bennett and Hoisington have lots of pads - more so in the connected ponds, potholes and back end of Bennett. There's some 'swamp' bass in a few places in that chain that are black as coal from living under the eternal darkness of pads and other surface cover.

I sometimes use Google Earth to zoom in looking for mottled green areas of shallower looking lakes to find candidates. If there are lots of shallow light spots, it might just be sand and/or sparse weeds (Cass Lake - main lake), but darker, greener colors mean weeds and lots of mottling may be pads or some other thick weeds (Cass Lake - Gerundegut Bay). Sometimes the satellite images were taken at a time of year when the weeds aren't grown up well, but I can usually get some idea of how advanced and shallow water body is.

I've had plenty of awesome frog/topwater days over milfoil, duckweed and other thick weeds that top out or coat the surface too so don't count that out. Isolated pads and other topped out or surface weeds were long one of my emergency backup plans if I had something better going in practice that flopped. I remember some key kicker bass they also produced and even many times when they were my primary plan, especially on a lake that had some other, way more popular options. Plus! There's dogfish in some of those places, and I often can't pass up a shot at a big doggie!!!

[Frank]

Middle Straights, Maceday, Otter/Sylvan, Silver - the one you access from telegraph