Dad, Daughter Find Steelhead Biting Big-Time — ‘Fabulous Fishing in Our Backyard’

By Eric Sharp, Detroit Free Press

Nov. 29–ST. JOSEPH — Watching her finesse a seven-pound steelhead jumping on the end of a line nearly 75 yards away, it’s obvious that even if the fish hadn’t played this game before, Danielle Lyons had.

“She fishes with me a lot. She’s a good angler,” her beaming dad, Carlton Lyons, said as he watched his 17-year-old daughter bring the fish to the side of the boat where Capt. Ken Neidlinger dipped a net into the rain-and-snow-swollen waters of the St. Joseph River and swung it into the cockpit of Silver King, his 24-foot Carolina skiff.

Neidlinger had put out eight lines five minutes before, four tipped with Hot-N-Tots and the others with Helin flatfish that wiggled enticingly in current. He didn’t have a chance to start backing the boat down into a deep hole where he thought steelhead might be before the first fish pulled down a rod tip.

“I’ve fished all over the country, and it’s just amazing that we can have this kind of fabulous fishing in our backyard,” said Lyons, an obstetrics and gynecology doctor from South Bend, Ind.

“Last week the water was low and clear,” Neidlinger said. “That’s perfect, because these fish like current and deep water, and you know the holes where they’ll be holding. The water was up about two feet higher than this a couple of days ago, and when it’s high they can be in thousands of places. If it’s medium, they can be in hundreds. But if it’s low, they’re down to dozens. Now it’s about medium high and cloudy.”

Neidlinger also was bedeviled by dead leaves the increased current sweeps off the bottom and hangs up on wiggling lures. But as Neidlinger used his outboard engine to swing the boat back and forth across the current while backing it down through the hole, Lyons said, “I know we’re going to catch fish for one reason, other than the captain — Danielle is here. She always catches the biggest and the most.”

Fall run started late

Michigan stocks the St. Joseph each year with 75,000 Little Manistee strain steelhead that enter the river from about September through March, with the bulk of them arriving in late winter.

Indiana stocks about 170,000 summer-run Skamania-strain steelhead at Mishawaka, 63 miles upstream from the river mouth (and 16 river miles south of the Michigan border), which start arriving in June.

“The St. Joseph gets a run of about 20,000 steelhead a year,” said Jay Wesley, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources’ southern Lake Michigan unit manager who works out of the Plainwell office. “Skamanias are there from June through September. But once November hits, you’re pretty much seeing Michigan fish.

“Right now people are catching nearly all of them between the river mouth and Berrien Springs,” about 24 river miles upstream. “When the water gets below about 45 degrees, they just don’t seem to want to pass up over the fish ladder there.

“In a normal year, we see about 15,000 steelhead pass over the ladder. This year, it’s only been about 8,000, but it’s been a strange year. The water was very warm early, then it got very cold, very fast. I think that means we’ll just see a good spring run,” Wesley said.

Neidlinger said the fall run started late, “and we were really struggling for fish until about 2 1/2 weeks ago. Then they came in, and we’ve had days when we’ve caught nine to 12, but the average is six per trip.”

Wesley and Bill James, chief of the Indiana fisheries department, said there is little natural steelhead reproduction in the St. Joseph. Juvenile fish must spend about 18 months in the river, and the water gets too warm for them to survive.

“Different studies have put the natural reproduction at 6-20%, and I think it’s mostly around (the former figure),” James said. “A few fish manage to spawn in some of the colder tributaries on the Michigan side, like the Dowagiac and Paw Paw Rivers and smaller creeks. But it doesn’t amount to much.

“We trap the (adult) Skamania at South Bend and hold 700 of them until winter, when we collect the eggs. We release them at Mishawaka when they’re 8-10 inches and they make their way downstream” to Lake Michigan, he said.

Unlike chinook salmon, which all die after spawning at 3-4 years of age, some steelhead survive to spawn several times and grow very large.

“We had one year class a few years ago that just wouldn’t go away,” James said. “We documented some of them at 6, 8 and even 11 years old. They caught some huge fish from that class,” one a 22-pound, 12-ounce steelhead that one of Neidlinger’s clients hooked in the St. Joseph.

A good day’s haul

This day proves relatively slow for one of the country’s best steelhead streams. The Lyons get six strikes and land four, all five- to eight-pounders. Three are chrome silver and fresh in from the big lake.

The chinook salmon that are the backbone of Lake Michigan’s booming sport fishery still abound there in near-record numbers, but because the baitfish population has decreased the past five years, especially alewives, the average size of the chinooks has dropped almost in half to about eight pounds.

Steelhead also have become a bit smaller, averaging about six pounds compared to a traditional weight of about eight, but Wesley said the steelhead are able to maintain their size better because steelhead have a much more diverse diet than chinooks, which feed almost single-mindedly on alewives.

During their two-year sojourn growing up in Lake Michigan, steelhead eat alewives and other small fish, but the bulk of their diet often is terrestrial insects — ants, bees, beetles, butterflies, mayflies and other bugs carried into the lake by offshore winds and eagerly picked off the surface.

“But in winter, their stomachs usually are empty. Fish fresh in from the lake might have a single (salmon) egg or small piece of spawn in them, but once the water gets cold, they just don’t eat very much,” he said. “Fortunately, they’re very territorial, and they’ll attack anything that annoys them — like our lures.”

Contact ERIC SHARP at 313-222-2511 or esharp@freepress.com. Order his book “Fishing Michigan” for $15.95 at www.freep.com/bookstore or by calling 800-245-5082. Neidlinger can be reached at 269-983-7816 or online at www.silverkingsportfishing.com.

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