I tried to do my Masters Research on Great Lakes burbot, but could not get my proposal funded after three submissions. They spawn when water temps. reach their ebb in late Fall/early Winter ascending rivers or spawning on gravel off their mouths. You should be able to catch some when the water temps drop doe to 40F in the Whitefish Channel. Smelt fished on bottom below a barrel sinker and in-line swivel off a tip-up works quite well, with better catches at night. They are much like catfsih and bullheads, using their barbels to locate prey. When I still had my camp up by the Sturgeon River in Baraga Co. we used to help a group at the sportsman's club west of Baraga who set several hoop nets under ice and divided their catch up among the participants. Most were of Finnish descent and Burbot are quite a big part of their diets. You should be able to catch some up off Garth Point, on the northern edge of that deeper water off the Days River winter access road or down by Saunders Pt. off Gladstone, as well as south of the USFS campground opposite Gladstone near the channel buoy off the drop-off.
Your other option would be to check the fyke netting laws in the fishing regulations and determine whether you can set them in November. The Tacoosh and Rapid are too shallow for the most part.
Clean them like you would a bullhead via a cirular cut through the skin just behind the gill opening, after you gut them. Grab a pair of channel locks or pliers and get ahold of a tuft of skin while holding the head and pull. The skin will peel right off in one strip in a single pull. You will end-up with three pieces of VERY good meat when you make a cut behind the rib cage and fillet the chunks off over the ribs.
When i started working for MSU's Great Lakes Research Lab I was hired as a diver to swim gillnets off the beach for a doctoral student who was studying seasonal fish populations in the surge zone. I also dove on an array of fixed current meters mounted on buoy fixed cables around the Ludington Pumped Storage Plant to .periodically change film packs and batteries. We had to check the moorings each time. At the deeper stations in 80 to120 FOW burbot were usually hanging around the mooring blocks, which were those concrete parking lot barriears that are anchored in the asphalt. We would sometimes catch them by hand and stuff them in our stash bags or the velcro compartment in the front of our BCs. I wrote-up an age and growth and food habits study off the specimens we caught via aging their otoliths. Never did get anything larger than 8lbs. but there are fish far larger than that out there. We caught several in the ten to 14lb range when we were fishing gillnets under-ice on the St. Marys River, most right on the edge of the shipping channel when I was working for the Feds. Never got a tag return on any of them..
.https://lrboi-nsn.gov/images/docs/nrd/docs/Manistee_River_Burbot_Assessment.pdf
Good luck!
