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    Forever Free: Your Right To Fish Michigan's Inland Lakes and Streams
    Forever Free: Your Right To Fish Michigan's Inland Lakes and Streams
    Forever Free: Your Right To Fish Michigan's Inland Lakes and Streams
    Ebook73 pages56 minutes

    Forever Free: Your Right To Fish Michigan's Inland Lakes and Streams

    By Dan Summerfield

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    About this ebook

    Michigan has between 10 and 11 thousand lakes and ponds, and more than 35 thousand miles of inland rivers and streams, almost of which are public waters. This book is targeted toward the hundreds of thousands of fishermen who do not know their rights on public waters and are either unwilling or unable to hire an attorney to enforce those rights.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDan Summerfield
    Release dateJun 19, 2010
    ISBN9781452361444
    Forever Free: Your Right To Fish Michigan's Inland Lakes and Streams
    Author

    Dan Summerfield

    A retired broadcaster, Dan Summerfield lives quietly in West Michigan with a friend. The friend is a cat named Dollar whose greatest wish is to use the symbol $ in place of his name. That way it will become the symbol of a feline formerly named Dollar.

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      Book preview

      Forever Free - Dan Summerfield

      FOREVER FREE:

      Your Right To Fish Michigan's Inland Lakes and Streams

      Dan Summerfield

      Copyright 2003

      Smashwords Edition

      Cover photo courtesy U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

      Cover art by Dan Summerfield

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      The author owes a debt of gratitude to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources for answering the questions that needed answering and for making available the Department publication A Guide to Public Rights on Michigan Waters, which was of enormous help in the writing of this book.

      CHAPTER 1

      Waterfront land owners come, to paraphrase an old cliché, in all shapes, sizes and mind sets. Many wouldn’t dream of challenging your right to boat, wade and fish the inland waters abutting their property. A growing number of others have come to believe that when they bought their property the water and fish were included in the purchase price.

      Whether the latter invested a few thousand dollars in a rickety cabin and a small lot on a stream or hundreds of thousands in a home on a lake they now consider exclusively their own, fishermen are regarded as unwelcome intruders. It is this group which has seized on a disinformation campaign meant to keep you from exercising your inherent right to use and enjoy Michigan’s public inland streams and lakes.

      An example: A friend told of anchoring his boat on the Flat River in Montcalm County and getting out to wade fish near the shore. Shortly after, the owner of the upland property appeared, angrily demanding that he get back in his boat and leave. The law, the owner claimed, allowed use of the river only for navigational purposes. It did not allow anchoring of a boat, wading, or fishing in waters abutting private property. He, the property owner, owned the soil under the water and only he and those to whom he gave permission could take fish there.

      The friend, not knowing his rights, apologized and moved on.

      What my friend did not know is that he had every right to boat, anchor, wade, fish or swim anywhere on the  Flat River, including the waters next to that landowner’s property right up to the ordinary high water mark. The claims that he could only navigate through the river and not anchor, wade or fish without a riparian owner’s permission was baloney. The Flat River in Montcalm County was indicated as navigable by the Michigan Supreme Court in 1873, which then made it a public waterway without question: a waterway open to all citizens including licensed fishermen and boaters, subject only to the boating laws and fish and game laws of the State. Those laws include the right to anchor as an incident to the right of navigation, though it does not include the right to anchor indefinitely off a riparian owner’s premises.

      As for fishing the Flat River, or any other navigable body of water, that right was spelled out in the U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids in 1934 when a judge ruled: "the right to take fish is not an incident of navigation, but a right arising from the fact that the waters in which the right is claimed are public waters. Both rights arise from the fact that the waters are public, not private. The rights coexist. Neither finds its source in the others."

      To understand the entire field of water law would  require a law degree and years of specialized practice in the field. But non-lawyers, such as myself, have no need to understand the entire field, only that portion that applies to our rights on our state’s inland lakes and streams.

      My education regarding those rights had its beginnings during a personal encounter with a property owner who told me I could not fish a small stream in southern Michigan. The reasons he gave were similar to those given my friend on the Flat River, though he added a few embellishments of his own.

      Since mine is a skeptical mind, seldom content to accept information as truthful until put to the test, I started checking out his claims. Two things resulted from that research: This book and I’m doing a lot more fishing now in waters I’ve never fished before.

      I hope the latter is what this book will do for you.

      CHAPTER 2

      My education began while cruising along a county primary road on a warm mid-August morning. Spotting a scenic drive road sign, I pulled the car onto a narrow dirt road that proved to have the corrugated surface of a Quonset hut and potholes which could have been made by bursting mortar shells.

      The road seemed anything but

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