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You Don't Have to Cross Ocean for Atlantic Salmon

Posted on: Wednesday, 4 July 2007, 06:15 CDT

SAULT STE. MARIE, Ontario -- Blame it on people like Ted Williams. If the famed baseball player and other celebrity anglers hadn't pronounced Atlantic salmon one of the world's premier game fish, it might not cost the equivalent of a good used car to fish for them.

Do an Internet search for "Atlantic salmon fishing" and the results are off-putting for the average angler. About the best deals you'll find for productive rivers are some beats in Ireland for about $150 a day. Top rivers in Iceland and Norway run more than $500 a day, with the worldwide average about $300.

That doesn't cover the cost of air fare or hotel rates.

Or you can drive to the Soo, launch a small boat on the American or Canadian side and catch Atlantic salmon at a rate that surpasses 90 percent of the salmon rivers in the world.

"I'm averaging eight to 10 Atlantics on a four-hour trip," Ontario guide John Giuliani said as he slipped a net under a 10-pounder that slammed a lure most salmon anglers would never think of using, a smelt-colored Slug-Go plastic bass bait on a jig head normally used for walleyes.

"This year is the best yet for Atlantics," said Giuliani, who for more than 10 years provided data to biologists at Lake Superior State University to help establish the St. Marys run. "We have two-year classes in this season, 2-year-olds that run 5-8 pounds and 3-year-olds that run 10-16."

Atlantic salmon apparently were unknown in the four upper Great Lakes before white settlement, but they swarmed in such huge numbers in Lake Ontario that there are records of 19th C entury farmers using pitchforks to fill wagons with hundreds of fish a day.

Those stocks were wiped out before World War I by overfishing and dams that blocked access to the spawning streams and covered the remaining spawning gravel with silt.

Several attempts were made to re-introduce Atlantics to the lakes over the next 100 years, and a fish would be caught every few years.

The planting programs weren't successful until the 1990s, when Lake Superior State began an intensive program of rearing and releasing thousands of Atlantic salmon into the St. Marys each year.

It took 10 years of dedicated effort before enough fish returned to convince the fisheries biologists that the planting program had been successful. Now the fish are reproducing on their own, although LSSU still plants them.

Compared with other salmon streams, the St. Marys Atlantics are average-sized. A big fish is 14-16 pounds, and no one has seen anything like the 30-pound fish found in Iceland and Norway. But the numbers are excellent.

Atlantic salmon usually reach the Upper St. Marys at the Soo in June and feed on smelt in the open river through August.

In September, the Atlantics begin to move into the rapids on the Canadian side, where they will spawn in November and December. There they are targeted by fly anglers using traditional nymphing and streamer techniques.

But when the salmon are feeding on smelt in the deeper water of the open river behind the Canadian power plant, or the U.S. federal plant in the middle of the river, Giuliani has developed different fly-rod techniques.

"When they're putting a lot of water through the plants and the current is at peak, it balls the smelt up and we watch for birds feeding on them. The salmon are driving the bait to the top, so we run over their cast smelt patterns to them.

"But if the current is slower, the fish are scattered, and we use regular fly rods and fly lines to slow-troll into the current and then drop back like people do when they're pulling plugs, trying to cover a lot of water.

"I have two marabou smelt patterns in tandem on rods that I put right in the prop wash, 20-30 feet behind the boat just a few inches under the surface. Then a little farther back I have a couple of more rods with small minnow patterns on them."

Giuliani usually fishes from about 5 to 9 a.m. and from 5 to 9 p.m., because the water is very clear and the fish tend to be more aggressive feeders in lower light conditions.

Source: Detroit Free Press

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