Bob Jewel, inventor of the Houghton Lake Special, is the man who taught Rusty Gates’s father how to fish. Jewel was a principal at an elementary school in Pinconning, and in May, when the hex hatch was on, Jewel would beat the buses out of the parking lot, and with Gates’s dad as passenger, rocket up to the South Branch of the Au Sable. “He had one of the first Corvettes off the line, and they’d buzz up north to go fishing,” Gates recalls.
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