BIG LAKE BIRTHDAY

I offer “gift certificates” of a sort for fishing trips on the Brother Nature. Instead of a fill-in-the-blanks form like you used to get from stores or the plastic gift cards you get these days, I send a letter that says something like:


Dear Mr. Lucky:
Your loving wife is giving you a special gift for your birthday, this year. You and three of your friends are going fishing on the Brother Nature.

Then I add other pertinent details, a brief run-down on how the season is going so far and prospects for the rest of the year. I send the letter to the gifter who can purchase a card and use the letter as an insert.
Since I accept credit cards, it works perfectly. The “giftee” doesn’t have to bring any money the day of the trip. It’s paid for - it’s a gift!

Ike dumped over 16 inches of rain on NW Indiana

Joe Davis was “Mr. Lucky” a few years ago but the stars seemed stacked against us. Joe picked a late September “king salmon” date but it turned out to be after Hurricane Ike came through and dumped a foot and a half of rain on the south end of the lake.

What happened to the fish after that much rain, no one knows, but there weren’t any to be caught.  “We’ll put it off until spring.”

The following spring came and then summer, then another season was gone. We kept in touch but our schedules just never matched up.

Joe and Joe Jr. with some of the "party favors." 

Happy Birthday Joe! We finally had Joe’s Birthday Party. There wasn’t any cake and ice cream, however. Not enough time for that and the eats would have had the distinct flavor of Lake Michigan trout and salmon. We did have a party with the fish!  Better late than never.

WHITECAPPED WEEKEND

Lots of people love their jobs. Many doctors, truckers, blue-collar, white-collar - even no-collar laborers as much look forward to going to work each day as coming home at day’s end. But few of them love every part of their work. All would have an answer to the question, “What’s the thing you dislike most?”

I love my job as a charter fishing captain. I love to be on the water. I love being outdoors. I love the challenge of getting the fish to bite for my customers and I truthfully enjoy watching them reel in a big one more than if I had the fish on the line myself.

So what’s the worst thing about my job?  Boat maintenance? Compliance with government regulations? Reluctant fish? Snotty customers?

Nope - it’s predicting the weather.

Everyone has expressed amazement that meteorologists can mis-forecast the weather so much of the time and still stay employed. (Maybe that’s why they like their jobs.)

Easy for them, they work indoors. No matter if their light and variable wind predictions turn into unexpected gales. No matter if a slight chance of rain turns into downpours.  For charter captains, it’s different.

All of my customers are choosing to go fishing with me over other leisure time activities. No one gets off work to go fishing, they plan for it. If they are out on the Brother Nature, they aren’t camping or golfing or staying home to putter in the garden. So if I’m wrong, not only do I subject my people to a miserable day on the lake, I exclude them from a different, probably more enjoyable activity.

This couple drove from Central Illinois to fish with me. 

Many of my fishermen come from afar. I’ve had them fly in to fish with me. Most drive several hours or more. I once had a guy drive non-stop from Slidell, Louisiana.

So I have to be better than the weather bimbos and staff meteorolgists. I have to be better than the weekend interns the government leaves in charge on weekends at the National Weather Service. I have to sift through and analyze forecasts that predict winds 10 to 20 miles per hour.

There’s about 5 feet of wave height difference between 10 and 20 miles per hour. There’s no such thing as a passing thunderstorm if it passes over the boat when we are 10 miles out in the lake.

So I’m sitting here side-lined on a white-capped weekend. Saturday was an easy call. Northeast gales always keeps the boat on the trailer. This time yesterday, however, the pros were calling for fairly calm seas for today. I didn’t much believe them.

I bet they are inside, maybe still in bed. Perhaps the interns are looking at the data and wondering what went wrong. The lake's weather buoys are registering east gales and showing 10-footers on the lake.

 Though I’m happy I made the right call, this time, I’m looking ahead to Tuesday when my next outing is scheduled. It’s not looking good. Wednesday looks better but what about the rain?  Thursday - I won’t even believe my own prediction for Thursday on a Sunday morning.

IOWA GUYS

Reed, Jim, Doug and Roger with some of their
Ill-Weather trout.

Doug Wheelock and a group of his friends from Northwest Iowa show up every April for a few days of fishing on the Brother Nature. I won’t say we haven’t seen the best Lake Michigan can offer on a few occasions, but it sure seems we get a good dose of the worst weather each year or at least some years, as well.

Had the weatherman been right, the recent “Iowegian” outing would have been about on par. Great weather was predicted on day one, turning to so-so weather for Friday and iffy to downright dangerous forecasts were posted for Saturday.

The weatherman couldn’t have gotten it much farther from the mark. Thursday was okay, but we fished in 2 to 3 foot waves most of the day, though sunny and bright.

What would Friday bring, when more wind was added to the mix in advance of an approaching front. In a word, nothing. The wind calmed and the waves subsided making for another bright, sunny day with plenty of fish caught.

Saturday, with all day storms, lightning and wind did prove to be different from the first two days. No wind gave us slick calm seas but the skies were overcast. If anything, that made the fishing even better.

With the season running a month or so early from the warm spring, we targeted lake trout on the Indiana Shoals, a huge sandbar that juts out into Lake Michigan from Lake County, Indiana. The lakers invade the shoals to chow down on gobies and at times it seems the bottom is layered with the great gray trout. 

Limits were taken daily, along with a few salmon but the important thing is the fun and excitement each trip brings to the group.  I’m already looking forward to next year - though there’s plenty enough left of this year to keep things interesting, I’m sure.

DON'T BE A LOSER

Ray Shepard earned the LOSER tag! 

Chapter 1)  I know how the black lace brassier got into my tackle box and I laughed at my friend’s effort to “punk” me. In fact, I stuck the fancy lingerie garment in the back of the Brother Nature’s glove compartment and used it as a “joke” prop to pull out occasionally when the fishing was slow.

I’d hold it up and tell the others, “You should have been on board last week when one of the customers left this!”

Chapter 2) I pulled out the black bra and told the joke one day when my customers and I were experiencing some frustrating action. We were getting lots of bites, but an inordinately large percentage of the fish were becoming unhooked before they could be pulled close enough to net aboard the boat.

I don’t know who thought of it or why, but one of the customers, seconds after losing yet another fish, ended up with the black bra strapped across his upper torso (at least it was on the outside of his jacket). Donning the bra became a penalty for losing a fish and the lingerie had to stay on until the “loser” redeemed himself by successfully boating one later.

I also don’t know just what the wives of these guys may have thought when they were shown the photos taken on board that day.

Can he be redeemed?

Chapter 3) I thought it was a good joke - but not right for every group and I could understand that some guests would view the penalty as being downright distasteful. Still....

So I resurrected a neck-strap name tag holder, printed up and fitted the holder with a card having “ LOSER” printed on it in bright red ink.

Now, when an angler whiffs on a few fish or displays a particularly poor fish-fighting technique resulting in a lost fish, out comes the LOSER tag. Usually, a few seconds after having this badge of dishonor bestowed, out come the cameras. The morose of losing a nice fish is transformed into fun and good natured ribbing. Again, hooking and boating the next fish allows the “loser” to remove the garnishment - and whoa to the next loser!

SUCCESS 

After all, if you aren’t having fun, what fun is it?

THE KINGS ARE IN

    There’s a saying among salmon fishermen: “A coho is a silver, the chinook is a king.”  It’s partly a maxim to ease the confusion between the Native American names for the two species of salmon and the names Europeans have given these fish. What Indians call coho salmon, English-speaking people call silver salmon. The Indian’s chinook salmon is the Anglo’s king salmon.

Nathan Eaton boated the first king
of the year on the Brother Nature

 But it’s more than that. The chinooks (or kings) are truly the kings of the salmon world. Both for size – the world record king is over 90 pounds, the world record coho is barely a third that size - and also for fighting ability.

  It’s easy math to say a larger fish fights harder than a smaller fish. But what if you were to hook a 7-pound king salmon to a 7-pound coho salmon?

The answer is subjective; since, to my knowledge, no one has ever done the experiment. But I’ve caught plenty of 7-pound coho and equally sized chinooks. The chinooks are much stronger. I think in the above “species to species” tug-o-war, the winner (you could say the “king” of the competition) would be the chinook.

   That’s not to say the cohos aren’t spunky and deserving of the “silver” medal in the contest. The two species react completely different when hooked to a lure, fishing line, rod, reel and fisherman. Cohos are more prone to jumping during their struggle, less prone to making long reel-torturing runs and very prone to spinning like a dervish when brought to the surface and into the landing net. The kings do make long runs - repeatedly - and are tough to wear down.

King salmon will bring a smile to
any angler's face. 

    It’s the way kings fight that bring a smile to knowing Great Lakes anglers when they hear good numbers of chinook salmon are being caught. Just whisper “the kings are in” and watch a salmon fisherman’s eyes glaze as he ponders his immediate (non-fishing) schedule, the weather forecast and other factors that stand between going toe to toe (hand to fin?) with some Great Lakes kings.

     Kings don’t usually get active until the water temperature in the lake warms solidly past 40 degrees and they kick into their spring feeding frenzy when the alewives move close to shore to spawn. That’s now!

    I told my fishermen yesterday it looked good on the sonar when huge schools of alewives showed close to the shoreline. I set some likely lures just above the swarms of spawners. Before the day was done, each of my guests had tangled with one or more of the king-chinooks, as well as a bevy of coho-silvers.

    As they left they told me, “Be sure to let us know next spring when ‘the kings are in’!”

TOO MANY MIKES

My cell phone rang as I sat waiting for my customers to show. "We are parked by the yacht club."

"Okay," I reply, I'm in the boat down at the boat ramps. Head back for the marina entrance and you'll find me. You can walk or drive down here and park. It’s not far.”

Ten minutes later, still no customers. (It’s only a 100 yards or so.) So I hit the “dial the last number” buttons on my cell phone and ask the guy if he’s gotten lost.
After a short pause, he said, “I’m on your boat.”

A nice brown trout was the trophy catch of the day 

“There’s no one on my boat but me,” I told him after a quick check.  The Brother Nature isn’t that big and it’s impossible to hide on it, but I checked anyway.

Then the customer said, “Oh, we’re on the wrong boat!”

I looked over to the D - Dock where I’d seen Capt. Mike Evano loading his customers a few minutes earlier.  Captain Evano looked over at me and waved.

Evidently, my group came walking along asking for Captain Mike and they were Shanghaied aboard Lakeside Charters.

It’s an easy mistake to make at the East Chicago Marina. Besides myself, there’s Captain Mike Orr, Five Orrs Charters, Captain Mike Tapper, N-Pursuit Charters, Captain Mike Evano, Lakeside Charters and Captain Mike Florey of Shadow Charters. I’m suprised this sort of mistake doesn’t happen more often.
Maybe it does, to the others. It was a first for me.

Once we got all the people on the right boats (the Lakeside customers showed up a few minutes later), we headed out for a frustrating day, losing as many salmon as we boated. Still, a fat brown trout ended up being the big fish for the day and there were plenty of coho filets in the ziplocks as they headed for home. (If they can find it.)

BUTT OUT

BoatUS Foundation has a new marina "butt pollution"
program. 

I gave up smoking 30-some  years ago but I’ll admit that before I did, I often tossed my cigarette butts into the lake when I was fishing. I didn’t consider myself a litterbug and would never have tossed empty bottles or cans overboard, plastic bags or any other “non-biodegradable” refuse. But butts were small, and I thought the remnants of the filtered Marlboros I smoked were made from a biodegradable packing that would “go away” in a short time.

Maybe that was true back in the 1980s, but now most cigarette filters are made from cellulose acetate, an early form of plastic still used in eyeglass frames and the textile industry. Cellulose acetate can last for decades in the environment.

The idea to write this blog came from a news release from the BoatUS Foundation announcing a continuation and expansion of their 2011 Cigarette Litter Prevention program which provided permanent and portable ashtrays at participating marinas.  http://www.BoatUS.com/foundationcigarettesurvey
The project proved successful in making it easier for smokers to snub out their smokes properly, rather than pitching the butts overboard or squashing them on the docks.

I think the Cigarette Litter Prevention program is great. I also think that most smokers, if they understood their cellulose acetate filters are more than just a temporary bit of litter, can police themselves.

Smoking on a boat is okay, but be reasonable and
dispose of your butts properly. 

So if you are a smoker and a boater, use an ashtray and dispose of your butts just as you would any other kind of trash. The money from the BoatUS Foundation can then be used to fund solutions to problems you didn’t cause.

Though I don’t smoke and wish everyone would quit smoking, I view the issue as a personal choice. The Brother Nature is an open boat so while on board, smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em. I don’t carry matches and haven’t got a cigarette lighter. And don’t toss the butts overboard.