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Thought I'd start a little discussion on the size of coho this year. Don't remember having to measure every coho the first week of april. Late February or early March maybe, but not now..
We've had a mild winter with relatively minimal ice cover. Not sure what to make of it, just really seems off from normal to me, and I see lots of posts here, and other sites echoing the same sentiments.
Go

I have only made two trips but the Coho I caught are small and thin. I personally don't keep them if I need to measure them but the fish look like late February instead of April. Is anyone seeing any bait while trolling?

Most of the fish we caught this year so far have been small also. There was a lot of bait around gary light yesterday out in deeper water.(4-3)

Definitely the dinkiest cohos ever for this time of year. That being said, it probably has more to do with lack of zooplankton and insects last summer than any lack of baitfish. I've probably cleaned a half zillion cohos in March and the first half of April in the past 40 years and have probably found less than a dozen baitfish in all those stomachs. I have no way of knowing but I'd wager for many of the cohos we catch in March here in Indiana, the first "minnow" they try to eat is one of our J-9s, RTs or other lures.

The Coho restaurants and bars are closed for them.

I agree with the size being down. Back in December it didn’t seem like a big deal, now it’s strange having to measure them this late.

Hard to know what is going on - possible that a lot of them are small because the lake conditions weren't great for them. As mentioned, lots of dinks caught in December, Jan, Feb isn't unusual, because they were getting caught much earlier than normal. On the other hand, one could make an argument that they might be small because a lot of them survived that otherwise would have died because they were too small to survive a normal winter. Really hard to say. Coho tend to be a barometer for alewife yearclasses, since they are only in the lake for one year. They either get on bait or they don't. And they mostly eat younger alewife. I heard preliminary indications that the 2019 yearclass of alewife was not great, but the spring lake committee meeting was cancelled due to Covid so I haven't seen a report or presentation

There's been a bunch of pretty big ones caught too - a month ago there were quite a few 17 to 19s caught from shore and from boats . But a lot of small ones mixed in. Likely that those much bigger ones got on bait nearshore, particularly gizzard shad in places like Gary Light, Shipping Channel, and the harbors and creek mouths

With reports starting to trickle in about bait showing up, I would expect average size to increase pretty quickly over the next month