Welcome!

My business is to provide people the opportunity to sample the exciting and challenging fishing available at the southern end of Lake Michigan. This page is dedicated to showing a bit of the behind-the-scenes work it takes to do that and to highlight the trips and fun my customers are able to experience.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

THE FINAL 15TH




Boat maintenance done. Some of my family duties (daughter moving) finished. Weatherman finally pre-cognized a great day, I rounded up a couple of friends and we hit Lake Michigan aboard the Brother Nature for the shake-down cruise. Though I’ve done it a couple times, I don’t like heading to the lake with "paying" customers for the first trip of the year. Ya just never know for sure.



But the Brother Nature fired right up with some fresh $3.60 gasoline. It didn’t seem to leak, the boat went backwards with the gear lever in reverse and forward once we were away from the dock at the East Chicago Marina.



Reports had cohos right outside the marina so why leave fish to go find other fish? Side planers were deployed, lures deployed and with only 4 or 5 rods set in our 9-rod array, the first salmon of the year struck, was skillfully played and soon entombed in the fish well. Then another and another and it seemed as though we were in for a quick limit.



So Greg decided to shake one of the smaller cohos hoping to replace it later with one a few inches larger. Then Tom misjudged his fish tossing skills and banked a coho he’d caught off the live well lid and back to the lake. No matter we thought, only to realize we’d abused our standing with the fish god (or lady luck) after a 2 hour dry spell.



The skies brightened and put the fish back in the mood and soon we were at or close to our 15 fish limit. Greg performed the count, by pulling each fish from the well tallying 15. But as he was stowing the load, the last fish caught, only a minute or two from the lake gave a tricky flip and it too suddenly found itself back home in the lake. We were back to needing one more fish.



Tom with our final 15th coho.


I started the fish cleaning and had all 14 fillets cut and bagged. Tom handled the clean up chores, washing down the deck of the coho blood and the final fish hit a Red Arty.



It’s game on! And I’m looking forward to a great season.....

Monday, March 7, 2011

ALMOST READY



My butt is as flat as a road-killed possum. The sport show season is over for me after attending the Cabela’s Captains Weekend at their Hammond, Indiana show. That’s a lot of sitting on a relatively uncomfortable stool for hours on end!

Actually, I enjoy the shows. They are not my most productive way of selling fishing trips on the Brother Nature, but there’s a steady parade of old friends and fellow fishermen stopping by my station–all with cabin fever as bad as I have. It’s good to see them and talk fishing. I didn’t keep a strict tally, but I’d estimate over the weekend the discussions at my table involved the harvest of several thousand salmon, a few mahi-mahi and amberjack, more than a few walleyes and a good number of ducks, deer, geese and turkeys.

Between the early calls coming from past customers, people finding me in other ways and the phone ringing after the show weekends, I’ve got a healthy number of trips lined up right on through the spring. There are plenty of weekday openings left and some weekends (mostly Sundays.) Give me a call and we’ll get you set up!

In the past week the ice in the marinas has broken and melted so the lake is open and apparently the pack-ice on the main lake has disappeared, as well. A very few boats have squeezed in some early action and have had a bit of success on cohos and brown trout. The water is still very cold and the fish concentrated in the warm water discharge areas. It’s also quite dirty looking which is a good thing.

That dirty water is what the sun works on and heats more rapidly than clear, clean water. The salmon would rather be in the warm water than the clear, offshore cold water so they swarm to the shallows. Things will break loose in the next week or so and the spring fishing excitement will be going full force!