A veteran TV personality and fishing/outdoors enthusiast Babe Winkelman visited the Mitchell’s Bay area last week.
Winkelman was producing an episode for his television show about waterfowl hunting in the area.
“We are excited to have arranged Mr. Winkelman and his television crew come to Mitchell’s Bay,” said Dale Hainer, owner of OutdoorSpot Media.
“The Bay and Lake St. Clair have a long history of superb water-fowling dating back to the 1800’s.”
While many hunting outfitters and private hunting clubs service the area in and around Mitchell’s Bay and Lake St. Clair, Winkelman was hosted on this outing by Chris Benn of Crooked Hook Guide Service.
“It is is very fitting that a man of Mr. Winkelman’s prestigious history has highlighted the very place where BH Red Fisher pioneered Canadian outdoor fishing and hunting shows from his cottage, ‘Skuttlebutt Lodge’ in Mitchell’s Bay in the late 1960’s,” Hainer said.
Hainer said The Red Fisher Show was set at fictitious ‘Scuttlebutt Lodge’ and featured silent home movies of outdoors activities, often involving fishing and hunting, which included high-profile guests, mainly from the major league sports of the era. Such guests included ice hockey stars Gordie Howe, Eddie Shack, and Johnny Bower, and baseball players Ted Williams, Roger Maris and Ferguson Jenkins.
Winkelman is a Minnesota-based professional fisherman and hunter, coming into the national spotlight with ‘Babe Winkelman’s Good Fishing’ television program, which was first syndicated nationwide in the mid-1980s and continued with his television hunting show ‘Babe Winkelman’s Outdoor Secrets’.
In 1988, Winkelman was inducted into the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame and a few years later into the Minnesota Fishing Hall of Fame.
In 1992, he was inducted into the Sports Legends Hall of Fame alongside Evander Holyfield for boxing, Pete Rose for baseball and 30 other athletes from around the world.
Winkelman is the only outdoorsman ever to be inducted into this hall of fame.
In 2007, Winkelman was given the Excellence In Craft award by the Outdoor Writers association of America (OWAA), their most prestigious award for his work with television.
As a production company, they have won over 200 awards for production excellence, 87 in a two-year span alone.
This included the New York Film Festival, the Houston International Film Festival.
Hainer and OutdoorSpot Media has been promoting fishing, hunting and the outdoor service industry in Ontario since 1987 from his office in Dresden, Ontario.
– Photo credit: OutdoorSpot Media
