TOPIC:

I agree. The Lake Trout are Lake Michigan's Apex predator and have literally taken over the bottom of the lake. Unfortunately the Salmon migration moves across the harbor mouths at approx. the same time the smolts leave the rivers and disperse along the shoreline. Anyone paying attention to the tournaments in early May can see it isn't a good time to be a small fish along the southern shoreline. I would like to see net pens used to at least help protect the fish while they acclimate to the river, imprint and smolt. Getting them past the birds would be something and a 3% return in the south would be huge compared to what we've been seeing.

Stocking the Chinook in one harbor is a subject I've tried to avoid although I agree. Stocking three harbors isn't working with the numbers we have been given. The problem is, everyone will like the idea but only if the fish are stocked in "their" harbor. Those of us that fish boats too large to trailer don"t want to make 25 - 30 mile runs in the dark to "combat fish" in front of harbors we aren't accustomed to fishing. Fishing until sunset would then also require a long run in the dark to get home. Splitting the difference and stocking them in a harbor central to all 3 harbors might be the answer and would make the Ditch happy but crowded. Would still require a run in the dark from Michigan City or East Chicago to fish the low light periods when fish are active.
I've had an issue with the Lake Trout stocking program for decades. Every reduction in Chinook stocking numbers to take the pressure off the forage base was met by the USFWS increasing the number of Trout planted.. If the Fish and Wildlife Service wants the netters to have an abundance of Trout, they can stock them in the upper part of the lake where they are netted. Even when the forage base is suffering they don't back off their stocking program.
Indiana should follow Wisconsin and raise the Trout limit to 5 per day allowing the Charter boats who make their living catching trout to flush some of them out of the system. I think the Lake can support a lot of Trout or a lot of Salmon but not both.
The lake has gone through too many changes to ever return to it's natural state and Tanner didn't stock Salmon to get rid of the alewives.
I don't have a lot of years left and would like to see salmon porpoise again in front of the harbor in September.

Nothing lights up the back of a boat like a Chinook.

Shortly after the BKD years when the Trout were targeted and wiped out, there was a resurgence of silver fish and the Charters were fine.

3 pages so far and 1110 views on this topic. Seems like we have much to consider and talk about.

It may be contentious, but Indiana should not write off “pulling a Wisconsin” now or in the future. “Pulling a Wisconsin” is defined by listening to its stakeholders, reviewing the same “science” that all states fisheries managers look at, and making an informed decision to do the best it can do for its stakeholders. It doesn't appear to be a complete disregard for "science" at all. I may be wrong, but I have yet to see or hear a single biologist from Wisconsin come out in opposition to its decision to stock more than the LMC agreed to. Are their hands tied? Is there a gag order? I dont know, but I have not heard it. Michigan has come out in opposition, but no one else...not even Indiana. Not even the tribes in Michigan.

And keep in mind, Michigan has been”pulling a Wisconsin” for decades now with its lake trout rehabilitation program. Despite its own “science” that says there isn’t nearly the baitfish biomass to support any significant stocking of any predators..what do they do? They continue to stock millions and millions of long living lake trout into the lake each year. Apparently, science only applies to silver, not to green? Those who fish the south end know very well what lake trout eat the majority of the year, once alewife show up from offshore to spawn nearshore. Something on the order of 90% of a lake trouts diet on the south end of the lake is alewife? That might not be correct, but it is a very high number. We are told there isn’t enough alewife to support stocking kings, but apparently there is enough to support stocking 2-3 million lake trout per year. Indiana thankfully has stopped stocking lake trout, but our friends to the north in Illinois have not, and Julians reef continues to be a lake trout factory. This will be a very very very long and difficult process to reduce that population of trout coming from that reef in the future. Until then, alewife (and baby kings) will continue to suffer on the south end of the lake.

I dont think there is much appetite to go catch 5 lake trout per person either. Wisconsin has had little interest or increase in lake trout harvest since those changes. Maybe the only way to beat a lake trout to an alewife is to stock way more kings, maybe they can get those alewife before the trout do?

There were days when I worked charters when we would have our 6 man limit of Trout by 10:00 am and would have to pull our deep presentations and pretend we might have a chance at catching a silver fish in July and August to finish the day. Could barely lift cooler out of the boat but customers would have gladly stayed and caught another dozen Trout. Most recreational fisherman are only interested in trout during tournaments. I have to wonder if there has been any new fish consumption advisory testing since the Trout have made gobies a large part of their diet and gobies eat mussels that spend their lives filtering pollutants out of the water. I won't make any friends picking on the trout but I often wondered if we were doing our customers a disservice by sending them home with large Trout fillets and not telling them about the fish consumption advisory recommendations.

The safest fish to eat are yellow perch, smelt, coho salmon, rainbow trout and lake trout less than 20 inches long. These were found to contain the lowest concentrations of toxic chemicals, minimizing some longstanding concerns about the safety of eating coho salmon. About 90 percent of the fish in this category were found to meet pure-food limits for the chemicals.

MSU has been doing some studies on this and they also came up with a 20 inch laker was on the edge.

Thanks Ed. My family has a fish fry every few months and I always include Salmon or Steelhead blackened on the grill to go with our Bluegills and Walleye. My family loves it. Our Trout fillets are taken to a Wildlife Animal Sanctuary in Albion and given to the Bears. It's their favorite.
Off topic but this mild winter has kept Erie open and my son is still fishing Walleyes and the fishing has been awesome. These fish were caught early this week. Hope your eye condition is improving.

Nice fish!

Man Dave that is some nice walleye. I so miss being out there this time of year. You know if we were out there we would be taking advantage of the no ice. I thought I recently read something were Erie Ohio was going to adopt the 3 rod rule

According to my son, Erie has just recently adopted the 3 rod rule. They fished the Walleye Fall Brawl in Oct. and Nov. and continued fishing through December. Started fishing in Cleveland and the fish are now around the Islands in the western basin. If we lived closer I'm sure we would take advantage of the mild winter. Mild winters are good for the alewives. Can't wait for Spring to get here. I plan on catching a lot of fish this year Ed.

Lots of good discussion here - hope some of it makes it to the meetings on Jan 30 and/or Feb 1

bloodrun wrote:

It may be contentious, but Indiana should not write off “pulling a Wisconsin” now or in the future. “Pulling a Wisconsin” is defined by listening to its stakeholders, reviewing the same “science” that all states fisheries managers look at, and making an informed decision to do the best it can do for its stakeholders. It doesn't appear to be a complete disregard for "science" at all. I may be wrong, but I have yet to see or hear a single biologist from Wisconsin come out in opposition to its decision to stock more than the LMC agreed to. Are their hands tied? Is there a gag order? I dont know, but I have not heard it. Michigan has come out in opposition, but no one else...not even Indiana. Not even the tribes in Michigan.

Well the entire lake committee (which includes a biologist from WI) made a recommendation which was ignored. I think you'd be hard pressed at any job to have employees publicly opposing a decision made by their superiors...especially one that was political. I'll just say I have not personally spoken to any biologist in any state that supports what happened in Wisconsin. I'll leave it at that because I don't want to speak for anybody, particularly if it would get them in trouble


For myself, I certainly do not agree with breaking 50+ years of consensus based management and have no intention of operating outside the lake committee structure and the joint strategic plan that everybody signed onto via the GLFC. It's not a perfect system, but no system is. I don't always agree with what comes out of it, but having all the states go it alone has pretty good potential for disastrous downsides.

In terms of lake trout biomass and abundance on the south end, it's pretty high and rising and I have some concerns with the same thing happening with wild lake trout that happened with wild chinooks. The ability to detect wild lake trout is worse than chinooks in terms of management, because they typically are 3-5 years old before they start showing up in angler catch, compared to 1 and 2 for chinooks. So it's a delayed detection ability. If And that gobies could experience the same issue affecting alewife - overpredation. Diet is a real nuanced thing to talk about - depending on when, where, and how fish were collected there are all sorts of different numbers. And obviously diet changes over time, as prey fish populations fluctuate, move around, etc. So any study is a snapshot. There's also significant regional variation in lake trout diet. But in any case, Austin Happel's 2017 diet study (physical study contents, collected from netting surveys) showed about 50% of the diet was gobies in southern Michigan waters, about 30% in Indiana, and 20% in Illinois. Purdue's 2016 study, using angler captured fish, showed western half of the lake's lakers ate about 90% alewife (probably what you're thinking of above) and the eastern half only about 40% alewife. That study also showed the significant seasonal change, as lake trout ate almost 100% gobies in April, 60% gobies in May, dwindling under 20% during the summer, then jumping back up in the fall. Lakers basically eat whatever is available, and they are overlapping with gobies fall, winter and spring, and mostly only overlapping with alewife in summer. I think that's the source of a lot of disconnect about what lake trout eat - you are entirely correct in saying they eat mostly alewife, or mostly gobies, depending on what season and where. Both things are true.

Ironically I think the policy of stocking more and more kings to get the alewife before the lakers can get to them would be a boon to lake trout long term, as that strategy would have a decent chance of depressing the alewife population so much that lake trout natural reproduction would increase even more as they shifted to a diet of fish without thiaminase, and long-term would probably crater the chinook population if the alewife were depressed beyond the point of population rebound


Also a good point about the harvest of lake trout as well - if anglers don't want to target and harvest them, it doesn't really matter how high the limit is. I didn't expect Wisconsin's 5 fish limit to affect much since their anglers are the least likely to harvest lakers in the first place. Harvest-driven strategies only work if the willingness and ability to harvest significantly exists.

In terms of Indiana lake trout harvest, probably 80% of the lakers harvested by boats launching out of Indiana are not caught in our waters, as the thermal habitat is not there once summer sets in. And when the cold water is there, most anglers are hammering silver fish in the spring rather than targeting lakers. So changing our limit to 5 would have almost zero real-world impact. And we like it to align with Michigan's to avoid burden on our anglers and to reduce the need for enforcement action on anglers that might be crossing state lines and fishing in both Indiana and Michigan. In fact, we changed our limit from 2 to 3 at the request of our anglers that it match Michigan's