KINGS EQUAL FRUSTRATION



KING SALMON ARE THE BIGGEST,
MEANEST, TOUGHEST FISH IN FRESHWATER



It can be the most rewarding time of year and because of that, it’s usually the most frustrating time of year. In late summer, Lake Michigan’s mature king salmon head back to the locations where they were stocked to go on their spawning runs. Those locations are public records so finding the fish is a simple matter. The records show exactly how many baby kings were stocked at Michigan City, Portage or over in Lake County.

The creel counts give an indication of how many of the fish were caught by fishermen, as well. A relatively small percent. Of course, some of the fish may have been caught elsewhere, or failed to survive their 3 ½ years in the lake, but statistically, there are a lot of salmon left and in September, they are mature and it’s game on for Lake Michigan anglers.

The problem is the fish are no longer feeding. Their goal is simply find the stream they need to swim up to spawn, wait until they are acclimated to fresh water, then wait for the right tide and continue their run.

Okay, there’s no salt water and no tides, but the fish don’t know that. They are a scant few generations away from ancestors who did swim the oceans and migrate to Pacific Coast streams and they still have western fish instincts.

A SONAR SHOT OF SALMON
STAGING TO MAKE THEIR '
SPAWNING RUN

After spending 3 ½ years at sea or in Lake Michigan, they are accustomed to snapping at any baitfish that comes within "mouth-shot." If your lure gets subbed in for a baitfish, lucky you!

That’s some days. Other days you can show your best baits to a thousand fish and only one or two will try to bite it. That’s the frustration.

You know where the fish will be, you know there will be lots of them but you don’t know when or if they will bite. That’s why you keep trying. For when it all comes together, you are hooked to one of the largest, meanest and most tenacious fish that exists in North America. That makes the frustration worth it!

ON A ROAD TRIP....

For all of you old enough to remember the old Peter, Paul and Mary song, “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” here are some alternate lyrics to the tune.

Hopefully, Doug will catch a bunch of
these, while I sit back and smile! 

My bags are packed, I’m ready to go
The boat is hitched and ready to tow
It’s loaded up with beer and fishing gear!

So many fish are waiting for me
But will they bite, we’ll wait and see
All I know is we will surely try.

Chorus:
I’m leaving on a road trip
To Ludington in Michigan
Leaving ......

Okay, so maybe I’m a bit ebullient (as well as a poor lyricist) but in a few minutes Peggy and I will be out the door and heading for a week’s vacation. She needs it from her work at the hospital, I need it from my work on Lake Michigan.

You may think it odd that after spending much of the last several months on my boat on Lake Michigan that I’d take my boat and fish Lake Michigan as a vacation. When I have paying customers on the boat, I’m working to keep them safe, entertained and happy with the amount of fish they are catching.  It’s not bad work, but it’s work, none the less.

I’ll be fishing with Doug Wheelock, a long-time fishing friend and Bob Simpson, a retired charter captain from Thunder Bay, Ontario. Both guys are familiar with boats, fishing and the gear we will be using. I won’t be doing all the work and I might even get to reel in a fish. Actually, I don’t care if I don’t reel one in, as long as I can just be out there without the pressure to put fish on the line.

So I’m still humming: “leaving on a road trip, leaving on a road trip.......”

BECALMED

When the waves are running 2 to 4 feet and we have to troll into them or worse, we have to head 16 miles back to the marina and can only manage 12 or 13 miles per hour without slamming the boat down into the wave troughs, I wish we were becalmed. It’s a nautical term invented by sailors on their tall ships. No wind meant no progress and apparently on the ocean, at times, they’d become becalmed and the condition would last for days.

Expect to wear a jacket and experience
some chop on summer morning trips. 

In the summer on Lake Michigan, it happens to us almost every day. Or at least on many days.

Pick a day when the temperature starts out predawn in the low 70s but the afternoon highs are scheduled at 90 degrees or more. Common enough in June, July and August. Such conditions are usually accompanied by winds with a southerly component - winds that blow from the land out over the lake.

Such has been the case for the past week and I’ve been experiencing it each day with my busy fishing schedule. Each day we’ve been becalmed and it’s great.

In the morning the low temperatures on land pretty well match up with the temperatures on the lake and the lake’s surface water temperature. So when the wind blows, it just blows right out across the water. In fact, devoid of trees, hills, buildings and such, it blows very steady and in short order, and as one continues from the nearshore area to the offshore haunts of the salmon, the waves build from a few inches tall to crests measuring several feet.

Some mornings there’s a steady chop, others are quite rough. I deal with whatever comes, knowing the “lake effect” weather will soon ease the conditions.

Cumulus clouds forming over the Gary, IN
lakeshore. 

On land the rising sun begins to heat the air and the land. Another hot summer day. On the lake, we may still be wearing a light jacket. Hot air rises, cool air sinks. Us fishermen have the cool air and often, on the shore and inland, they have the hot air. Often, towards the distant shore we see cumulus clouds start to blossom - a sure sign of becoming becalmed.

As the wind blows, the hot air rises and simply floats aloft over the cooler air on the lake. We notice the wind and waves subsiding and in a relatively short time, the conditions go from choppy to slick calm.  If we were in a sailboat, we’d be becalmed.

The last fish of many trips comes when we are
BECALMED

I smile. It may still be a long boat ride (distance wise) back to the harbor but the Bro will easily cruise at 30 mph on a calm lake and by now, the wind stream we feel from the speeding boat feels great.

A WELL-STORIED FISH

I’m trying not to start off on a morbid note, but one of the realities of life is that everything is destined to die. Humans spend millions to fight off death. Animals instinctively know how to avoid being killed. Even plants have defense mechanisms that kick into gear under adverse growing conditions. But in the end, it’s the end.

Every fish caught comes with a story. 

Some things die hard. Ever had a weed in your garden that just kept resprouting? Some things seem to tempt their fate daily. Human daredevils can get rich or famous (or dead) from their exploits.

Some things just seem bent on destruction.

I encountered a steelhead yesterday that filled that bill to a T and gave a couple of fishermen some thrills along the way. One could argue it was the fish’s fate. Others might call it destiny.
After all, the reason one of Indiana’s fish hatcheries made the effort to capture it’s parents, care for them until the eggs were ripe and fertile, then nurtured the hatchling from fry to fingerling to big enough to stock in Lake Michigan was with the hope some fisherman would eventually hook up with it.

The last fish my group of anglers hooked Saturday morning came with a surprise. I extended the net and scooped the struggling fish out of the lake, ending the tussle. As I lifted the fish into the boat, I noticed a strand of monofilament line in the net along with the fish.

“Odd,” thinks me. I try to keep stray strands of mono picked up, and hoped one of my lures wasn’t attached to (or detached from) the extra fishing line.  As I removed the lure that had caught the steelhead from the fish, some of the wayward line was tangled in the treble at the end of the spoon.

“Doubly odd,” thinks me. I noticed the line wasn’t my line at all. Too thin. Probably 4 or 6 pound test. My first postulation was that the hook had snagged onto a length of discarded line, however, I’d think more than a few inches of it would have disturbed the action of the lure pulling through the water and the fish wouldn’t have bitten it.

Then it dawned on me to look again inside the mouth of the fish. Sure enough! Embedded inside was a bright red perch-sized hook.

The perch hook in this steelhead's mouth is a
clue that it's a part of some other fish story. 

Some perch fishermen in the recent past went home with a “fish story” that went something like, “I felt a tap and set the hook and instantly knew it wasn’t a perch.”  Or perhaps, “The rod pulled down like I’d hooked a nuclear submarine....” The end of what ever story he told had the same end. “The line broke.”


So this steelhead, destined from birth to die and nurtured from it’s conception to be caught by a happy angler, became a “well-storied” fish.  When it bit the perch fisherman’s minnow, it gave him or her a story to tell and a lasting memory. When it bit the spoon trolling behind my boat it gave a tale to the angler who fought and won the battle. In addition, it gave me a story to tell to you, as well. All fish should meet such a well-storied end.

TRAILER REHAB DAY

Boat trailers are designed to be “rode hard and put up wet.” They better be - at least mine better be since I put several hundred miles on my trailer weekly and may dunk it into the lake twice daily, day after day after day.

But things that get used and abused wear out and the wooden, carpet covered bunks that support my boat were well worn. In fact, many of the supports under the bunk-boards were rusty and weak.

So a repair day was scheduled at Dick McNeely’s workshop near Attica. Not only does Mack have all the tools needed and welding equipment, I was able to recruit another mutual friend, Jim Eason, to pitch in on the work.

There was one downside to the location: no nearby lake to offload the Brother Nature so we could get at the trailer.  Our first chore was to jack up the boat high enough that it was suspended above the trailer. Some begged and borrowed jack-stands helped, a bit of blocking and crawling around under the rig and inch by inch, the Bro ascended and the trailer pulled free.

The old boards were removed and the metal work started, first removing the old board supports with torch and grinders, then welding new ones in place. A spritz of Rust-Oleum and they were good as new. Using Mack’s utility tractor, we tilted the trailer to make it easier to fasten the new bunks securely.




Repositioning the trailer under the boat went very smoothly and soon the rig was again road-ready!  A few Heinekens to reward ourselves for a job well done finished the job in style.

HAT TRICK

There was an amazing incident on the boat yesterday that I decided would make a great blog posting. However, as those of you who have ever heard me tell a story can attest, sometimes my tales become a bit lengthy.   

By the time I was done, the story was long enough to be a full column for my regular slot in Michigan Outdoor News called “Great Lakes Logbook.”  So here’s the downsized version of the event.                                                  

While in the middle of a Great Lakes Fire Drill (the confusion that occurs when 2 or more salmon are hooked at the same time) and in 3 foot waves, my hat dislodged and fell into the lake. We couldn’t stop or turn around and by the time the fish were boated, the lines redeployed and the fire drill over, we’d trolled a half mile or so from the location. 

No, I didn’t mark the spot on my GPS and even if I’d done that, the hat would have floated off in the waves from any waypoint I’d created. Still, we had to fish somewhere and I knew there were active fish back where my hat was floating; so I made mental calculations of what heading would put the boat on course and steered a gradual turn. 

As we approached ever nearer to “ground-zero” a salmon bit on a long line trailing over 100 yards behind the boat. Those take a while to reel in, but the angler handled the chore admirably. Just as I scooped the fish into the net, one of the other passengers said, “There’s the hat!”  

Yes indeed! About 10 yards off the starboard bow, the bright yellow hat floated soggily awaiting rescue. The fish was in the boat, my white forehead saved from the sun and my lucky hat was saved.    

STEELHEAD SLAM

Perry Pendell, from Chestertown, NY, completed the BN
Grand Slam for 2012

 The Salmon Unlimited club used to give an award to any member who caught a coho, chinook, brown trout, lake trout and steelhead all in one year. Those are the 5 major species of trout and salmon in Lake Michigan. There are a smattering of pink salmon and Atlantic Salmon that stray into the northern part of the lake from Lake Huron, but not many. The award was called the Big Five. Others called it the Grand Slam.


Nowadays, getting the Grand Slam for the season is not as big a deal. Some people manage it in a single day. The Brother Nature normally has fresh DNA from the big five species on the boat by mid-April and if there’s a missing specimen, it’s usually lake trout since I stick close to shore as long as possible in the spring, before heading “out for trout” when the nearshore action wanes.

This year, the Brother Nature anglers had caught lake trout by early April and there were plenty of kings, cohos and browns in the mix starting in March. It wasn’t until I mailed in my catch report for April I noticed there hadn’t yet been a steelhead on board for 2012.

Steelhead should be increasingly important the
rest of this summer. 

Normally, in the nearshore early season fishery, one steelhead bites for about every dozen cohos. And since catching dozens and dozens of cohos is normal, the first steelhead isn’t long in coming.

Yesterday, May 27, was the first day we dripped a bit of steely-juice on the floor. I don’t think it’s a reflection of fewer steelhead available, rather just poor concentrations of ‘heads in the area I’ve fished and luck of the draw. The Indiana DNR stocks more steelhead than any other species.

As we get into the summer season, I expect to see these hard-fighting, high jumping beauties on the ends of the line on an increasing basis. I suspect in a week or two or three, the summer run Skamania strain will start crowding the shorelines and steelhead will become the feature attraction.

‘Til then, it’s good to have broken the ice and completed the Brother Nature’s annual Grand Slam.