There Are Still Salmon In The Harbor

I took a trip down to the lake wednesday with my little girl.  She had the greatest time terrorizing the geese.

 

 

 

After she tired of chasing geese, we started for the car.  As we were walking back, an angler that we had spoken to briefly about the day's lack of action was setting the hook.  He reeled in a two foot chinook that fought valiantly.  Five minutes later, he was reeling in the coho pictured below.  The bite turned on as the clouds rolled in.

 

 

My little girl didn't want to leave after this because she loves looking at fish.  We stuck around for a while, watched half a dozen or so missed hook sets, and saw one other chinook come ashore by a second angler.  Finally, we left for the car, but as we were driving by on our way out, I saw one of these guys scramble for the net again.  Pretty good day, I'd say.

Repost: Fishing For Big Trout And Salmon in The Great Lakes

The salmon run is fast approaching, and this old blog post of mine has been getting a lot of traffic.  I'm doing something I've never done and recycling some old material to help my followers get ready for the salmon and steelhead run. 

First off, I've added a couple new pages, a little bio about myself, and a page with links to the official fishing websites for every state, and Canadian province.  This could be helpful if you're ever planning a multi state or international fishing trip.

A couple enjoys the view on Milwaukee's
north pier

Fishing for salmon and big trout is one of the reasons I love living so close to Lake Michigan.  If you've never seen one of the Great Lakes, they're big!  My Minnesotan wife still calls Lake Michigan "the ocean."  As I discussed in an earlier post, most trout and salmon aren't native here, so the Great Lakes might be a nice opportunity to get out on a stream and catch a nice chinook without going to Alaska.  Fishing out in the lake with a boat is the obvious way to go, but I don't have a boat, and I'm going to assume you don't either.

Mckinley Marina in Milwaukee

What you are going to want to do is find a pier, or some structure that allows you to get out in the lake.  I think the wall provides cover for smaller baitfish, and big fish come there to be treated to a buffet.  When fishing off the pier or even just off a wall into the bay in Milwaukee, I like to use big, heavy spoons that cast far and get down deep.  In my opinion, Acme Tackle makes the best spoons, with my favorites being the Little Cleo, The K.O. Wobbler, and the Kastmaster.  I've caught more salmon on Little Cleos than on anything else, I even mentioned the name Cleo for my daughter, but the wife shot that idea down.  I like the silver and blue ones for salmon.  I've never caught a steelhead, but I hear that orange is the hot steelhead color, and gold is good for big browns.  When fishing the lake, I'll use a heavier one, the 3/4 oz size casts further and sinks faster.  The Kastmaster also casts very far, it's not just a clever name.  With these lures, just cast as far as you can and wait while the lure sinks.  Retrieve the lure just fast enough to make it wobble, you'll feel it.  You can also use Wildeye Swimbaits or Rat-l-traps for trout and salmon in the lake.  There is no telling what else might bite those though.  Fishing in the lake is great fun, the bites might be few and far between, but there's something about sitting along our gorgeous glacial sea all day with a sandwich for lunch, and a beer or three that takes you far away from the world while a million people scramble in the city just a half a mile away, completely oblivious to what a beautiful resource we have.

I found this Kastmaster in some streamside bushes

The Little Cleo is about the sexiest lure there is

My Rat-l-trap has seen some action!

In about mid August, the salmon will start to move toward their natal stream. This time is the best opportunity to catch them in the lake, or even in the channel if they start to swim upstream.  Any change in the weather will make them start to move and then you can try to catch them in the streams.  It might just take a drop in temperature, or a little rain and a few overcast days to make them start running.  I've caught salmon in the middle of August in the White River in Michigan, but this year, I didn't see any salmon in the Menomonee until the end of September.  In the streams, I'll still use Little Cleos in deeper pools, but I may use a 2/3 or 2/5 oz instead of a heavier one.  They move a little more erratically in the current than a heavier one.  I will also use some diving crankbaits in the streams; Storm makes my favorites, and they're reasonably priced too.  The deep diving Thunderstick Jr. and the Hot 'N Tot are the ones I use most.  You will find that fishing in the stream can be very frustrating.  There are days when the salmon are so thick that you could walk across them, but they won't bite a thing, then other days, they'll bite anything!  If you're on the stream and salmon are flying out of the water like ballistic missiles from a Russian nuclear submarine, that is the day they will bite anything.  You will probably get splashed by salmon jumping, and they'll scare the hell out of you, but they are angry at everything in the water.  All you have to do is put something in the water with some hooks in it.  The best days always seem to be overcast and rainy days.  I've had the best luck in the evening on overcast and rainy days; not a really hard downpour, just a steady rain.  In both the stream and the lake, using ten pound test line is probably adequate.  I've seen guys use 20, but that's overkill.  This season, I used 6 pound test and I only had one salmon break my line.

Two Hot 'N Tots and a Wiggle Wart

My Thunderstick, marred by salmon teeth.  Note the
scale just behind the front hook.

This is the first year I've ever spent a lot of time fly fishing for salmon.  I cut the tapered leader down to about three feet and just tied on about six feet of hybrid six pound test.  I used mostly Woolly Buggers, and egg sucking leeches.  I haven't had a chance to use my creation, the Force Choking Leech, very much.  You can find instructions on how to tie it here.  If you're a fly fisherman, you're probably better at it than I am, so I can provide very little instruction.

Egg sucking leech with flashabou in the tail

Kittie examines my fly tying skills

Probably the best looking bead head Woolly Bugger
I ever tied.

Salmon and trout can be hard to catch, but you'll remember your first one forever!  I fished for salmon for a few years before I caught my first one, It was October 1, 2002.  It takes time to learn how these fish work.  I can feel the change in the weather that brings the salmon into the streams now,  an instinct I can't explain.  The clouds look a certain way, the air has something different about it.  It took me years of fishing and lots of luck before I even had a salmon bite.  How bad do you want it?

Monday Favorite: My Favorite Candid Photo

I have always loved catching candid images of people.  They are so much more natural than posing a shot in a predetermined "special place," or a location that a photographer chooses to use as a backdrop.  In early October I snapped this photo on my Nikon coolpix L24 on the Menomonee River, as seen originally in this post.

The guy fighting the salmon had been fighting her for some time and had attracted quite a bit of attention, nobody cared about the guy with the camera and the baby, and I snapped half a dozen shots or so almost completely unnoticed.

I Can't Figure Technology Out

I was just looking through my phone and I came upon a lot of pictures of fish going back quite a ways.  I don't have a very smart phone, and I just learned how to get photos onto my computer by texting them to my email.  I need to delete some pics to make more room for pictures of my baby girl, so here's a bunch of random pictures!

I caught this carp in October
2011 on a black Mister Twister

I found this wild melon growing streamside just
before halloween.  I knew what I had to do.

This is the coho that broke my rod

That was a beautiful fish.  Does it look
like a steelhead?

Many salmon in the Menomonee that day

My Little Cleo watches crows fly over

My father in law takes it all in

Really? Budweiser?  this is Miller country!

I took this kid from work fishing I think I lost
2 that day.  I think he was using Thundersticks.

All the fish pictured that I caught were released, but the kid kept his two.  The Budweiser salmon probably died of natural causes and had the beer bottle added later.  There were many dead salmon at that particular spot for a long time.  That coho was probably the hardest fighting fish I caught all season.

My First Salmon

Wednesday, 10-2-02
Midnight

It's my dad's birthday today.  I finally caught a fish worth bringing home.  A king salmon.  31" about 15 pounds.  Louisiana is about to get hit by Hurricane Lili.  A category 4 storm.

I read Deuteronomy chapter 24 23

English 201: My Positive Influence

I wrote this paper for my English 201-225 course, it was graded C.

Nate Fordham

Prof. Dee

English 201

February 15, 2009

My Positive Influence

My dad has been a positive influence in nearly every aspect of my life.  My mom and dad were divorced when I was seven years old.  Custody of my younger brother and I went to my mom.  As a result, I only saw my dad about eight hours a week, and every other weekend.  A lot of time during these weekend visits was spent fishing, where my dad gave me a love of nature, held me responsible for my actions, and taught me to make the most out of less than ideal situations.

By teaching me how to fish at a young age, my dad taught me to appreciate the outdoors.  My earliest fishing memories are from around age five.  I remember catching two rainbow trout in the Muskegon River.  At that age, my dad baited the hook, cast the line into the river, and waited by the rod while I threw stones and looked for frogs.  When there was a bite, my dad would set the hook and tell me I was catching a fish.  I would run over to my dad and reel it in.  It was not long after this that my dad taught me to cast with an open face reel, and how to bait the hook.  By the time I was ten, I knew how to tie the hook on with a clinch knot, add weight, and a bobber.  Doing these things with my dad pulled me away from the television set and into the wild.

By watching my dad’s stream-side manners, I learned a great deal of responsibility.  There is a place on the White River that we used to fish.  The riverfront was private property in this location, owned by a business.  My dad would go to the business and ask permission to fish there.  The owner of the property was happy to let people use the property to fish.  He would ask that we signed a liability waver, and did not leave trash.  My dad would always get upset when he and I would get to a fishing spot to find trash from another angler.  It seemed like we would always carry out beer cans and worm containers when we left, in order to leave the area nicer than it was when we got there.  My dad taught me not only to be responsible for myself, but to step up when others are irresponsible.

Sometimes in order to achieve good results one must step outside his or her comfort zone.  I learned from my dad that for some reason, unknown to him, the fish really bite in the rain.  They also really like to bite early in the morning.  My dad took me perch fishing one time on Muskegon Lake.  He woke me up at five o’clock on a Saturday morning, so we could be on the water by six o’clock.  This was a brutally cold morning in May where we both caught close to our limit of thirty perch. It is because of my dad’s early morning fishing trips in just above freezing conditions that I had no hesitation braving the elements two years back.  I chose to go fishing on a cold autumn day in the rain, while recovering from a hernia operation.  The weather was miserable, my feet were soaked before I got to the river, the wind was fierce, and I was all alone.  That cold September day in 2006, I caught the biggest fish of my life, a thirty-eight inch chinook salmon.

Today, I understand the value of rural areas.  I am not afraid to take the road less traveled just to see what is there.  I am a responsible individual who knows the importance of doing more than my share.  I regularly put myself into unpleasant situations in order to achieve favorable results.  My dad continues to this day to be a great influence in my life.

Keepers

We went fishing as a family this Thanksgiving for only the second time.  My wife doesn't actually fish, but she makes a great photographer.  You can check out her blog if you want.

Lilyhammer hides from the sun

Christina does not like fishing

The Menomonee River

Lilyhammer loves daddy's hat string

Amazing graffiti

...F stands for failure

Not the most scenic stretch of river

The fishing was slow and I didn't even have a bite, but I still have a couple of keepers.

Beers, Brothers and Broken Rods

Earlier in the fall, my wife accidentally slammed my only remaining spinning rod in the trunk of our VW.  Me, seeing that the dashboard lamp indicating that the trunk was ajar, opened the trunk and slammed my rod in it again.
To be honest, I did not care much for the rod.  It was a Shakespear Tiger Spinning rod, available exclusively at Walmart.  It was cheap, and it brought in a lot of fish.  The rod was cracked pretty severely just below the female ferrule, but it wasn't totally broken; I was going to fish with it until it met its end.
I'd prefer to fly fish, but I will not fly fish with my 8 month old daughter on my chest-- I don't trust my fly casting ability-- and most opportunities I have to fish are with her when I take her for walks.  Despite the damage, the rod still landed some serious salmon out of the Menomonee River!  But finally, in the end, it was a 22" coho that did it in.  I still landed the fish.

My brother has been trying to make a trip to our side of the lake since August, but a new position at his job made finding a free weekend unpredictable.  After my rod broke, I told my dad and he has more gear than he knows what to do with in his mancave.  He had a couple of old rods that he was going to send with my brother when he finally came.  Shane usually has his head in the clouds, but he likes to get on the water occasionally when he's not flying.  We were planning hitting the Milwaukee for smallmouth in the summer, but salmon are prevalent in the Menomonee even so late in the fall.

Me and Shane, 2009

Shane after flying an Extra 300

Magician Lake Bass trip, 2012

Shane showed up late friday, we went to Cafe Hollander for beers and conversation.  after the beers, we skipped stones in the river for way too long before calling it a night-- it's so much more fun after a couple beers.  The next morning, I swapped the reel on one of the rods my dad sent for my nicer one.  Shane, Lilyhammer and myself walked out the front door and hit the Menomonee while my wife stayed home.  We walked for a mile or so before we saw fish, and then it wasn't long before I had one on.  I instantly asked Shane if he wanted to land the fish-- He had never caught a salmon.  He said "I don't not want to land the fish," or something along those lines.  Lily and I readied the net, Shane took the line.  Shane eventually brought the fish to the to the net, the fish came ashore, pictures were snapped and the fish was released.

Shane's salmon

He wanted to see me catch one, but I couldn't get another fish to bite.  That's fine though, I've caught a dozen or so this season.  There will probably be a couple more before the weather gets really cold, and then there is the spring steelhead run!

Binders Full of Salmon

See what I did there?  But really, the history of members of the Family Salmonidae in the Great Lakes could fill several binders.  Most species that are common here now are fish that do not occur here naturally, while our native species are represented by diminished populations, hardly representational of their former abundance.  One species has even been driven to extinction.  As an angler, I think it is important to know the history of the fish you fish for to better appreciate them.  So I am going to consolidate binders full of history into a few paragraphs.

The only members of the Family Salmonidae that are native to the Great Lakes are the lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush), the brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis), the atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), and the arctic grayling (Thymallus arcticus).
The arctic grayling population was decimated by the logging industry and by the stocking of nonnative species.  They have been extinct since the 1930s.  All efforts to reintroduce this beautiful fish to its native streams have failed.
The atlantic salmon was only native to Lake Ontario but they have been stocked in other Great Lakes tributaries with mixed results.  Torch Lake is still stocked with the atlantic salmon in Lower Michigan, and in Upper Michigan, the Saint Marys River between Lake Superior and Lake Huron is supposed to be just about the best atlantic salmon fishing on the continent.
Lake trout were driven to the edge of extinction by overfishing and invasion of the sea lamprey, but efforts to save the species have been successful, even though their population is a fraction of historical levels.
Brook trout are still found in native streams, and stocked in other streams outside of their native range. They only thrive in the most pristine waters, mostly in the upper portions of the Great Lakes and mountain streams.
I'm not sure, but I think some species of whitefish are native to the Great Lakes too.  Other than those few species, all others are nonnative.

Lake trout with lampreys attached

Brook trout

Atlantic salmon

Arctic grayling

The members of the Family Salmonidae that have been introduced into the Great Lakes are the brown trout (Salmo trutta), the rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch), and pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) as well as a lake trout X brook trout hybrid that is commonly referred to as splake.
A German guy, the Baron Friedrich Felix von Behr helped introduce brown trout from his favorite streams of the Black Forest to the USA in the 1880s.  They were first introduced into a tributary of Lower Michigan's Pere Marquette River-- And then from there, just about every imaginable body of water in the nation.  In the Great Lakes, we have both stream resident brown trout, and lake run browns.
Rainbow trout were introduced in a similar fashion to brown trout starting around  the 1860s.  We also have stream resident and lake run rainbows.  Lake run rainbow trout are commonly called steelhead.  Steelhead are one of the most sought after fish in the Great Lakes.
Chinook and coho salmon were introduced into the Great Lakes originally in the 1800s, but they failed to thrive and eventually disappeared, probably because of mismanagement.  Again, chinook and coho were stocked in the Great Lakes to fill the apex predator role left vacant by the waning lake trout population starting in 1966.  With the lake trout on the verge of extinction, invasive species such as the alewife ran rampant, and annually, billions of alewives would die and wash up on the beaches of the Great Lakes.  This was not great for tourism.  But you know what is great for tourism?  Salmon fishing in the Great lakes!  Win win!
In the 1950s, pink salmon were planted in Lake Superior accidentally when about 100 tiny little yearling salmon escaped from a pen while they were being loaded onto a plane headed for Hudson Bay.  Then again, when about 20,000 "excess salmon" yearlings were "disposed of" in a sewage drain-- that led into a stream-- that fed into Lake Superior.  The idea was that the small fish would have no chance at survival amongst the predators of Lake Superior, let alone a sewage drain.  Pink salmon are pretty well established in the Great Lakes today.
Splake are raised in hatcheries and stocked in the Great Lakes almost strictly for sport fishing.  They are bred because they grow faster than either parent species and because they are highly unlikely to breed in the wild.  Since they are so unlikely to breed in the wild, the splake population is easy to control.

Great Lakes brown trout in spawning colors,
late summer 2008.

Great lakes brown in the spring of 2008.

Steelhead

Rainbow trout

One of the prettiest chinooks
I have ever caught,
late summer 2007.

I caught this fish in the spring of 2008.
I was never too sure, but I think it's a coho.

Coho

Spawning pink salmon

Splake

It can be pretty hard to identify some salmonids,
this is the guide that comes in the Wisconsin
trout and salmon rulebook.

When I was younger, I believed that the salmon we had in the Great Lakes had to swim all the way in from the Atlantic Ocean-- I just knew they came from the ocean.  Most people probably don't think twice about where the fish come from, or why they're here now.  It's a shame that our native species are so few in our lakes and streams, but we still have most species.  And I'm glad we have the introduced species for now.  Knowing about the history of these fish has made me more appreciative, this is why I practice catch and release the vast majority of the time.  In a later post, I'll talk about catching some of these beautiful fish.  There is nothing like the rush of catching your first chinook in a secluded wooded section of stream in the middle of nowhere.