- Hello, everyone.

Welcome to "Michigan Out-of-Doors."

I'm Jenny Ciolek, and we've got a fun show headed your way this week.

Gabe VanWormer's gonna stop by and walk us through a custom handgun build that he did recently.

Pretty interesting stuff.

You won't wanna miss that.

And we've got some other exciting adventures in store for you this week.

- Well, that's right, Jenny.

We do have a few more things on this week's show.

We're gonna kick things off on Saginaw Bay doing a little walleye fishing.

Then we're going to stop in at a pretty cool wildlife museum/game room.

You won't wanna miss that.

Lots of good stuff on this week's program.

You stay tuned.

I'm Jimmy Gretzinger.

It's time for "Michigan Out-of-Doors."

♪ From the first spring rains to the soft summer breeze ♪ ♪ Dancing on the pine forest floor ♪ ♪ The autumn colors catch your eyes ♪ ♪ Here come the crystal winter skies ♪ ♪ It's Michigan, "Michigan Out-of-Doors" ♪ - [Jimmy] What a beautiful day in the woods.

♪ Someday our children all will see ♪ ♪ This is their finest legacy ♪ The wonder and the love of Michigan ♪ ♪ As the wind comes whispering through the trees ♪ ♪ The sweet smell of nature's in the air ♪ ♪ From the Great Lakes to the quiet stream ♪ ♪ Shining like a sportsman's dream ♪ ♪ It's a love of Michigan we all share ♪ - [Jenny] "Michigan Out-of-Doors" is presented by.

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From overgrown acreage, to wooded lots, to shooting lanes, True North services include cleaning and leveling for the next step.

Information and quotes available at truenorthserviceslm.com.

(dramatic music) (rifle booming) (upbeat music) - Well, Anthony, tell me where we at today.

- We are going out at Quanicassee River on the Saginaw Bay.

- Yeah, targeting some walleyes?

- Yes.

- [Jimmy] And afternoons as good as the mornings?

- It has been so far.

- Nice.

- Yeah, should be a nice evening.

- [Jimmy] How many days a week are you getting out to fish?

- Six or seven, depending on the weather, whatever the weather allows.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- [Jimmy] And when did you start doing some guiding?

- [Anthony] This is my first year full-time.

- Okay.

- Yep.

- And how's that been?

- It's been great.

You know, it's been an experience getting off the ground.

- [Jimmy] And what kind of fishing are we gonna be doing tonight?

Crawler harnesses, plugs?

- We're gonna be trolling flicker minnows today.

- Oh, okay.

And what kind of depth are you typically trying to find fish in?

- Right now, I've been getting them in 13 to 16 foot of water.

- Okay.

- Yep.

Sometimes they move a little deeper this time of year, but the bite's been staying good here, so I'm staying put.

- [Jimmy] When Anthony reached out to us and said it really doesn't matter what time of day we got on the water, well, I was pretty intrigued.

Usually we have to be to the dock so early, but not the case right now on Saginaw Bay.

We found fish right away.

And of course our first one was not a walleye, but shortly thereafter, we did find what we were looking for.

And our first fish, well, it's something I had not seen before.

A tagged walleye.

The small tag allows biologists to track fish migration, growth rates, and mortality.

And you can either keep or release the fish, but you should always report the catch.

- Another one here.

So far it's been pretty consistent.

I don't want to jinx it.

You find that at different speeds, you'll catch larger fish.

- Definitely find on certain days the bigger fish like a certain speed.

Whether it be slower or faster, it's different each time, but I don't think there's anything.

Yesterday they wanted it slower than the smaller fish would bite at higher speeds.

And once you slowed it down a bit, the bigger fish would bite.

(water rustling) (reel whirring) - I don't think he's gonna make the cut.

- No, he's not.

He's going back.

(water rustling) (reel whirring) - Man.

Another one.

Adding to the pile, my friend.

- Pretty steady.

- The fish fry is coming together.

- Well, things are pretty steady today, so I was able to reel in a few fish as well.

We did use all flicker minnows today with a variety of colors.

Mostly 60 to 80 foot behind the boat and all with an inline planer board.

Nice.

- All right, I'll switch you, reeling that one.

- It's like grocery shopping out here.

- We've been out here for an hour.

Fishing's been a little slower today.

We're trying to adjust speeds and figure some stuff out in this spot.

We've been seeing a lot of smaller fish, so we're gonna do this run again and we're gonna switch some things up and see if we can't get into some bigger fish.

- [Jimmy] The action was pretty nonstop and walleye on Saginaw Bay only need to be 13 inches to keep and you get eight per angler.

We did throw a lot of fish back today, but we also got plenty of 17 to 20 inchers that are perfect for dinner table.

It was a very fun day on the water.

(bright music) - Keeper.

Look at that.

Perfect little eater walleye on Saginaw Bay.

Nice.

(bright music) (reel whirring) Hey, there's a good one.

All right.

- Yep.

Hey, we have a good one.

- Come on, boys.

- We're starting to see nicer fish.

(bright music) - [Jimmy] Anthony definitely has this dialed in.

It's fun to see young guys like him trying to make it as a fishing guide.

That can be a ton of work and like today, you do get some rather interesting characters on your boat to say the least, but he does seem to have this water pretty much figured out.

- We got into them.

It was a little bit slower paced today than the other days, but we still ended up with our limit and things were running not so deep today.

We adjusted lines, ran them a little bit higher, and we finally got into 'em.

- [Jimmy] And the fishing will stay good here for how long this summer?

- [Anthony] Hm.

Till about mid-August, mid to late August.

It'll stay really, it'll stay consistent.

Then it tapers off.

Once we get some cooler weather coming in, it starts to taper.

It starts to cool off.

- We were just setting that one.

I was just getting the planer board put on and it ripped the line right out of my hand before I got the board on.

- Nice.

- Yep, it's hot.

They're ready.

(reel whirring) - Lift up.

- Nice.

There we go.

Good job cameraman.

Yeah, we're getting some nice fish now.

I think we've got well over one man limit.

I think we're getting that close to a two man limit.

Beautiful fish.

Nice job, captain.

- Here they are, last two fish of the day.

- Nice.

I know it's getting a little chilly out here.

We might have to get some.

- It is not.

- What is it, 90 with no breeze?

(reel whirring) (bright music) - Don't get me competing.

I'll do some foolishness.

- [Anthony] There we go.

Ready?

- Yeah.

- Nice boys.

Thanks to Anthony from Catch Saginaw Bay.

If you're looking for a fun morning or afternoon, Saginaw Bay has what you're looking for right here in Michigan's Out-of-Doors.

In our next story, we are gonna visit with a good friend of the show, Gabe VanWormer, and see what he's been up to as he's putting together a really cool long-range shooting pistol.

- [Gabe] In 2025, I decided to buy a specialty pistol and start learning how to shoot long range.

I took that stock gun out to Wyoming and shot in the handgun hunting competition and I learned a lot.

It made me a much better shooter and I still have a lot to learn.

But one thing I realized is I wanted to have a gun made for that kind of shooting.

The nozzler shot well, but it was heavy and I just wanted something a little better suited for that competition.

So I picked up an old Remington XP100 action and a Lilja carbon fiber barrel in six millimeter.

I took it down the road to Williams Gun Sight in Davison, Michigan.

The gun I brought in was rough.

Several decades worth of neglect had left it with missing pieces and questionable gunsmithing.

But Rob Canze assured me that it would work just fine with a little bit of work on his part.

- The gun that we're working on is a Remington XP100.

They started to manufacture the XP100 somewhere around 1960, 63, something like that.

The gun that we have that we've been doing this work on started out life as a .221 Remington Fireball.

A rather small caliber that was designed mostly for varmint hunting, some light small game hunting as well.

We had to build the gun out for a competition and some hunting as well.

So we had to make the gun more accurate than it would've been originally.

Blueprinting is one thing that we do too that putting a new barrel on of one of the top barrel manufacturers is another and then fitting it into a stock that's appropriate for the job at hand.

- [Gabe] After many hours of work blueprinting the action so it was perfectly square, it was time to work on the barrel.

Barrels come without threads or chambers cut, so like blueprinting, it takes a skilled machinist to do this precise work.

- Everything locks like it's supposed to.

So you know that everything is on there because that can't be turned even with finger pressure on the receiver.

You've got good square shoulders now.

And it comes off kind of hard.

(bright music) (tool whirring) Now what we're going to do is get ready for chambering.

We're gonna slow down the rotation of the lathe to an absolute dead crawl.

It's like paint drying, this section of it.

The reamer's going to go into the tool holder and it has a floating tool holder.

You'll see that actually move around.

A lot of people get worried when they see that.

It actually keeps the reamer on line with what we've indicated.

It's actually extremely accurate.

The reamer that we use too has a removable pilot so the pilot is fitted to each individual bore so there's no play between the rifling and the tooling itself.

So it gives you the best possible chamber concentricity.

Okay, now what we've got is a head space gauge.

This is gonna determine where we stop.

It's actually a ground gauge designed to tell you where your zero head space is at.

So we slip that in the chamber and it's still sticking out quite a ways.

The face of this here will normally be about flush with the back of the barrel extension here.

So you can see that we've got about 3/8 of an inch further to go in before this is close to where we need to be.

When we get closer, we'll actually start taking critical measurements.

As long as we know where we start, you see that the reamer stops exactly on 10.

So as that proceeds, it will cut in exactly how much that says it is going.

So we'll start coming in.

We're coming up on the zero.

That zero, we add about a thousandth to that for crush.

And technically, that chamber is complete.

Now the only thing that we have to do is take all this out, clean it out and then polish the chamber so that it releases fired casings properly.

So take our go gauge, drop it in, push it into the chamber.

Moment of truth, it goes.

There's absolutely zero end play on that bolt.

Can't see any motion on it at all.

So we're there.

And that will snug up a little bit when we tighten the action onto the barrel.

That's why the extra one thousandth after the zero count.

- [Gabe] With the magic of editing, this looks like a quick process, but there are hours of work in between these clips you are seeing.

Each of which are made to look easy by a master gunsmith like Rob.

(bright music) (tool whirring) - Okay, yep, that's it right there.

What we're going to be doing next is re-indicating the outside of the barrel so there's no run out on it.

And then turning the brake to match the outside diameter of the barrel.

That way, it'll look like it was always that way, like it was one piece of metal.

It wasn't added to it.

It looked like it was made that way to begin with.

And that's how we blend them in.

- After some finish work, you can't even see the line between the break and the barrel.

Rob finished out the build with some stock work and glass bedded the action.

The end result is nothing short of a piece of art.

It's all typical of the attention to detail you'll find at Williams.

(bright music) (upbeat music) (gun popping) Well, I've been shooting this gun for a couple weeks now and boy, it is a shooter.

I mean just a tack driver.

So I've been just doing some load development, doing some shooting and everything.

Getting ready to shoot competition in June.

But those guys over at Williams, Rob Canze did a great job of putting this together.

So I'm just doing a little bit more load development.

Today I'm testing out different primers, setting up the Garmin.

Got my earplugs in.

Gonna shoot this at 100 yards.

Gonna shoot a couple different loads.

A couple different groups out there and see what happens.

Should be fun.

(upbeat music) (gun popping) First one, I was trying something new that didn't work.

I don't know about that flyer, but that's a pretty good group.

There it is.

That's the final shot.

I figured that's gonna be the load.

That's the load I figured was gonna work, but when you work up load development, you gotta try some stuff and it really, this one seems to be pretty sensitive as far as the bullet seat depth, but when I get it right, boy, I get it right.

It's the first morning of a crop damage shooting I'm doing this year.

And it's a little chilly out.

It's 44 degrees when I got up this morning so it's perfect for crop damage.

And I'm excited because I've got a new gun and look at this beauty.

It's a carbon fiber barrel by Lilja.

A custom break on the end from Williams.

It's all set up beautifully and this gun shoots.

It flat out shoots.

And I had this built for a competition out west.

The handgun hunters competition.

And the best way to start getting ready for this is not only loading and shooting targets and everything, but also shooting it in the field because that's what this is all about.

And I'm excited to be out here.

I can hear turkeys gobbling over there.

The sun's just breaking, just breaking the horizon right now and it's a great time to be out in the woods.

Any time is a good time to be out in the woods.

(birds chirping) (gun popping) (gun popping) Well that happened quick.

That sun is beating down on me.

It's warming up quick.

And I got one down across the way about 200 and 250 yards across the field here.

I shot that one and I heard it hit.

I'm not sure where I hit it, but it just trotted off.

And then three or four more came out of this side and I shot one of those and she's dead right out in the field.

She might've gone oh 75 yards or so.

She kind of just trotted out this way and just tipped over.

But first two kills with the 6BR, brand new gun.

Wow.

That was awesome.

I think this deer chose about the worst place to die.

This place just covered with poison ivy.

I mean it's everywhere here behind me so I'm gonna have to be really careful and really clean up good when I get home and not touch my face or anything or anywhere really.

I'm gonna have to clean up real well because there's poison ivy all over the place.

But I'm gonna get her out.

There's a processor literally within about five miles of here.

They take donations so we're gonna drop off these two deer and we're gonna get with it, get back at it here in a couple days.

After a bunch of practice and field shooting, I took this custom gun out west for the handgun hunters competition in Wyoming and put it through some tough situational shooting.

The gun shot absolutely amazing and performed better than I could have hoped.

(gun booming) - That's it.

- Nice work.

- Special thanks to Rob and Williams Gun Sight for their expertise.

Breathing new life into an old firearm.

- Well, if you find yourself in Clare, Michigan this summer looking for something to do, check out the Webber Wildlife Museum/Game Room.

It is quite the place.

If you're looking for a cool museum that is also a one of a kind trophy room, well, that is where I was just last week when I got to visit this unique place in Clare, Michigan.

A lifetime of hunting from Wayne Webber is a site worth seeing.

- Welcome to the Jay's & Webber Wildlife and Education Center.

We are a conservation museum.

We teach about environmental science and conservation, especially when it comes to hunting and quite a few different aspects of that.

We feature 300 different specimens from all over the world, primarily North America, Africa and parts of Europe.

All of the animals in here were collected by one individual, Mr.

Wayne Webber.

And so 50 some years worth of hunting.

As time went on, he started to amass quite the collection.

And with still owning that old office building that he had started his concrete business in over in Macomb, he ended up moving his collection over to that building and that became his own private museum.

And it's there that he would bring in different school groups, education clubs, quite a few different groups such as that.

And as time went on and he was getting less and les traffic and couldn't quite manage it, he ended up reaching out to the Poet family and had asked if he could make his entire donation to the Jay's family.

- [Narrator] Well, it was time to look around.

So Joe Kramer ran us through a shortened version of the full tour.

- So we're gonna start off by the time we put our very first post in until the day we had our very first grand opening, it took four years.

And why it took four years is mainly the people that put it together spent so much attention on detail.

Take the murals on the wall for example.

One man painted all the murals.

It took him almost two years to do it.

He would take a little picture, stick it up on the wall and he would freehand from there, do some graphing.

And if you look at the first scenery, our very first scenery right here is looking out Mr.

Webber's back door in Thompsonville and this is actually his backyard.

And when Mr.

Webber's business got going so good, he moved to a central place in the United States.

He moved to Texas.

And when he moved to Texas, he met a young man named Cactus Jack.

And if you look at our windmill here, this is actually off of Cactus Jack's Ranch.

Cactus Jack won a 30,000 acre ranch in a poker game one night.

He ended up selling 10,000 acres to Mr.

Webber.

And in this corner scenery is our 10,000 acres down in Texas that Mr.

Webber bought.

A couple of things that we got here.

We got Texas in the background.

People like to know why we have a Texas longhorn in our wildlife display.

One reason only is he's a very unique and rare longhorn.

Then we're gonna get into a little bit, I call this Northern Canada where we got the caribou who's definitely a migrating animal and sometimes they'll migrate into the thousands.

Gray wolf always follows the migration.

Then we come into the white rhino.

The white rhino is another animal that we really cherish.

And if you look at the white rhino here on the horn, we have a number tattooed.

And on that number, if they ever have an inspector or anybody comes in and asks questions about how legal our animal is, of course we have all the paperwork, but he can put that number into the computer.

It'll tell him exactly where that animal was harvested, what day it was harvested, what time of day it was harvested, who the hunter was and who the professional guide is.

So they know the rhino was 100% legally taken.

- [Narrator] Well, this is quite a room and Joe does a great job running you through the story of Wayne Webber and his hunting career.

It is something to see a great trophy room, but this was on another level.

- That pretty much concludes our tour for today.

I hope you enjoyed it.

I hope you come down and see me.

I'll welcome you all day long.

Have a great day and thanks for coming.

- [Narrator] So if you're heading past Clare, you may want to stop by and hear the story of Wayne Webber and how his hunting career is now teaching others about the importance of conservation here in Michigan and beyond.

- Thank you for joining us this week for "Michigan Out-of-Doors."

Make sure you come back in upcoming weeks.

Lots of great summertime things headed your way.

We'll be chasing after muskies, sturgeon and some more walleyes.

You won't want to miss those stories.

And if you have a great story idea for us, you could always get ahold of us online.

- Well, that's right Jenny.

Online is a good way to kind of interact with us and see what we're up to on a day-to-day basis.

Instagram and Facebook are probably the best two ways for that.

Make sure you are getting out and enjoying everything our state has to offer.

And if we don't see you in the woods or on the water, hopefully you'll see you right back here next week on your PBS station.

- [Jenny] "Michigan Out-of-Doors" is presented by.

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Morgan Composting offers a variety of products all powered by Dairy Doo Organic Compost for homeowners and farmers.

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GreenMark provides sales and services to farmers, commercial businesses, large property owners and homeowners.

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(bright music) (gentle music)