Detroit Free Press Eric Sharp Column: Lake St. Clair Yields Two Phenomenal Fish
By Eric Sharp, Detroit Free Press
Aug. 19–Two remarkable muskellunge have been caught on Lake St. Clair in recent days, one the largest fish ever recorded from that body of water, and the other a tiger muskie that rarely occurs outside of a fish hatchery.
The big fish — 41 pounds, 14 ounces — was caught by Art Kornosky of Grand Rapids, who was fishing with his son, Mark, of Fairhaven, and two friends, Don Taylor of Holly and Mark Van Nuck of Fairhaven.
They caught it trolling a Loke St. Lawrence lure last weekend during a Michigan Ontario Muskie Association tournament.
Competitors filed a protest saying that Mark Kornosky is a charter captain during the week, and though his dad owns the boat, simply having his dad, Art, on the boat doesn’t make him an amateur on weekends.
But no matter how the tournament standings shake out, it doesn’t change the fact that this is the biggest muskellunge weighed in during MOMA’s 51 years of existence
And because MOMA has always demanded that fish be weighed accurately in tournaments, it could be the biggest muskellunge ever to come out of Lake St. Clair, despite rumored bigger fish that were never documented.
Lake St. Clair is the most productive muskellunge water in the world. It’s common for trolling anglers to land from 10 to 20 muskellunge a day, numbers that would be a good month on most lakes.
But it has yielded only a handful of documented fish more than 40 pounds, and anglers think that is the result of two factors. First, the enormous abundance of muskies, estimated at 60,000 to 100,000, results in fierce competition for food. And second, Lake St. Clair muskies feed mostly on lean fish like smallmouth bass and perch, whereas lakes that produce record muskies have larger populations of high-calorie prey species like whitefish, suckers and chubs.
Two years ago, several thousand muskellunge were killed in Lake St. Clair by a fish disease, viral hemorrhagic septicemia. Kornosky thinks the VHS mostly killed medium-size fish, 36-46 inches, and that a decreased muskie population has meant more food to go around.
“There’s no question muskie numbers were down last year,” he said. “A couple of years ago, I’d tell you that if you gave me eight hours, I’d get you 10 fish. I couldn’t do that last year. And this year started out slow, but now it has really taken off again, and we’re seeing a lot of big ones.”
The other unusual fish was a tiger muskie, a cross between the Great Lakes muskellunge that abound in St. Clair and a northern pike.
Forty-one inches long and about 20 pounds, it was caught on a Bucher Top Raider plug by Jerry Kunnath on a busman’s holiday when Kunnath didn’t have a charter.
“I thought that it was a monster pike right up until we got it to the boat,” Kunnath said. “I’d heard of tiger muskies, but I’d never seen one or heard of anyone else catching one here. It was so unusual, I e-mailed the picture to a Department of Natural Resources biologist.”
That biologist was Mike Thomas, who works in the DNR’s Lake St. Clair research laboratory, and he confirmed it was a tiger muskie and that it was rare.
Great Lakes muskellunge have dark spots on a light background. And while there is a subspecies called the barred muskellunge, it has light, wavy stripes on a green background and is found in inland lakes.
“When I put the picture online, some people came back and said it was a barred muskie, not a tiger,” Kunnath said. “So I said that if that was the case, I wanted someone to put on another picture of a fish from Lake St. Clair that looks like that. I’m still waiting.
Kunnath’s fish looks like the tiger muskies produced in fish hatcheries, with strong dark barring and spots. The tips of a Great Lakes muskellunge’s tail are pointed, and the tips of a northern pike’s tail are round. The tips of the tail on Kunnath’s fish are in-between, fitting perfectly with the description in ichthyology texts.
Tiger muskellunge are a popular hatchery cross, especially in the South, because they grow quickly compared with the parent species and are useful for controlling panfish populations.
Lake St. Clair has a huge muskellunge population and lots of northerns largely because there is so much room to keep the species separated. But because their mating times have so little overlap, Thomas said, it’s rare for the pike-muskie cross to occur naturally, although biologists have found a few sexually ripe male and female pike in the lake in May.
Contact ERIC SHARP at 313-222-2511 or esharp@freepress.com.
—–
To see more of the Detroit Free Press, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.freep.com
Copyright (c) 2007, Detroit Free Press
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.