Early Signs Point to a Super Salmon Season

By Eric Sharp, Detroit Free Press

Apr. 26–ST. JOSEPH — While he has been catching limits of three- to four-pound coho salmon for the past couple of weeks, Capt. Ken Neidlinger hopes that next week will bring a repeat of a phenomenon he saw last spring in St. Joseph Harbor.

“Every year in late April, early May, the alewives come into the harbor by the millions,” said Neidlinger, who runs Silverking Sportfishing Charters. “Last spring, we were trolling the channel and the turning basin when we saw huge numbers of salmon on the (sonar) graph, stacked up in 24 feet of water.

“We anchored and began jigging with noodle rods and Hopkins spoons. It was great. You’d drop the spoon down, jig it a couple of times and your line would take off with a big Chinook on it.

“This year, we’ve been limiting out on cohos until a few days ago. They’re not very big, but if we went out with six people, we could have 18 fish, a mix of cohos and brown trout, in a few hours. Then the cohos just disappeared, and the fishing got kind of tough.”

State Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologists say that while the numbers of the primary prey fish — alewives — are lower than they would like, there are enough to support good numbers of salmon in Lake Michigan.

Unlike mammals, which have a genetically determined maximum size, most fish continue to grow throughout their lives as long as they get enough food. In 2001, with huge numbers of alewives available, the DNR handed out nearly 300 master angler awards to people who caught Chinooks 27 pounds or larger. In 2006, there were only 13 master angler Chinooks.

“The harvest will be down this year, as will be the sizes, and you’ll probably see more anglers turning to steelhead,” said Randy Claramunt, a research biologist in the DNR Lake Michigan laboratory at Charlevoix.

Claramunt said that the total biomass of prey fish in Lake Michigan had been declining for five years and was near record-low levels. Rainbow smelt and bloater chub numbers have increased slightly, but with the exception of the 2005 class, smelt numbers have decreased dramatically and the 2006 smelt hatch was very small.

Lake Michigan produces about 30 kilotons (60 million pounds) of alewives each year, but “the salmon eat them up almost at the rate they can grow,” Claramunt said.

Jim Dexter, a DNR Lake Michigan fisheries supervisor, said some anglers wanted the state to start rearing alewives in hatcheries to feed salmon. But Dexter said that if the state stopped all other fish rearing and turned all of its hatcheries to raising alewives “we figured out that we could produce enough to feed the salmon for about two days.”

Early anglers on Lake Michigan this spring say things are starting out about the way they did in 2006.

“We got two really nice brown trout, about 10 and 12 pounds, trolling body baits in 12 feet of water off Holland,” said Andy Cook of Grand Rapids. He added that he was “always among the first guinea pigs out there every spring.”

“The problem has been the wind,” he said. “I have a 22-foot boat, and a lot of days have been so rough it takes the fun out of fishing. But a couple of buddies have been able to get out more in their bigger boats, and they got a ton of cohos off Holland and some nice browns, too. If this is an indication of what we’re going to see when the Chinooks come back, it should be a real good summer.”

Tom Rozich, the DNR fisheries division natural resources manager in the Cadillac field office, said that alewives produced a strong class in 2005, the first good hatch of the prey fish since 1999.

“Alewife numbers are low now, but they’re not in dire straits,” Rozich said. “We had a pretty fair year class in 2005, and that turned the size of the kings around, and I think it also helped the brown trout.”

Like the Pacific salmon that prey on them, alewives are an exotic species in the Great Lakes, arriving through manmade canals starting in the 1800s. They were followed in the early 1900s by parasitic lamprey eels that almost wiped out the native lake trout that kept the numbers of alewives fish under control.

The disappearance of the lake trout resulted in a virtual alewife explosion throughout the lower four Great Lakes, and in the 1960s, Pacific Chinook and coho salmon were introduced to bring them under control again.

For the past 40 years, the size and numbers of the salmon fluctuated with the population of alewives. In Lake Huron, where zebra mussels have apparently broken the bottom levels of the food chain, alewives have almost disappeared, and salmon numbers have been reduced dramatically.

Biologists say that because Lake Michigan is biologically richer, especially at the southern end, and can avoid a similar collapse. But to make, sure, the states around Lake Michigan have cut back on their annual plants of salmon and brown trout, counting on natural reproduction in streams along the Michigan shoreline to keep the ecosystem in balance.

Ken Neidlinger can be reached at 269-983-7816 or www.silverkingsportfishing.com.v

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Copyright (c) 2007, Detroit Free Press

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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