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Salmon fishing strong
MICHAEL BURKE This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Jul 4, 2016 0
Salmon fishing

MICHAEL BURKE photos, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Jeff and Trish Kloet of Roscoe, Ill., show four of the seven salmon they caught Sunday in Lake Michigan.
Fishermen

MICHAEL BURKE, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Randy Kisley of Mount Pleasant, in front, sets out from the Pershing Park boat launch on Sunday with Wally and Matthew Cieczka of Cudahy to fish for salmon.
RACINE — If Lake Michigan fishing continues as it has been lately, Salmon-A-Rama will be a lively, exciting contest this year.

On Sunday, fishermen and a charter boat captain said Lake Michigan salmon fishing has been stellar since early spring and were eager for the annual competition to begin. The nine-day Salmon-A-Rama starts Saturday and runs through July 17.

Eric Rambis, lieutenant commander deckhand at Reefpoint, said fishing has been strong, and he plans to win the $20,000 grand prize.

Randy Kisley, 36, of Mount Pleasant launched his Starcraft Fishmaster 196 at the Pershing Park boat launch about 2 p.m. Sunday, confident he’d catch fish even at that time of day.

Then he and his fishing companions, Wally Cieczka and his 11-year-old son Matthew, went out and proved him right. Fishing from 2:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. — definitely not prime time for fishing — they went out and caught their limit. They netted all five sport species the lake offers: brown, lake and steelhead trout; and chinook, also known as king, and coho salmon that ranged from about 6 to 15 pounds.

“It’s the best fishing anyone’s seen in the last four years — especially for king and coho,” said Kisley, a superintendent for a general contractor.

“There’s been a lot of bait around, a lot of young alewives. So there are a lot of big, healthy fish.”

“There are a lot of 20-pounders around,” Kisley said. “You didn’t see that last year.”

Jeff and Trish Kloet of Roscoe, Ill., set out at 4:45 a.m. in their Four Winds boat and returned in early afternoon pretty satisfied with their seven coho salmon. Jeff estimated they weighed 4 to 6 pounds each.

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He and Trish fished off Wind Point in 55 to 60 feet of water.

“They were hitting,” Trish remarked. “We lost a couple.”

The Kloets both are entering Salmon-A-Rama, and Trish proudly said their grandson won the Junior Division last year.

Racine native Josh Keeran, a Chicago fireman and captain of the charter boat First In at Reefpoint Marina, appreciates the dramatic change in fishing action from last year to this one.

“Last year was one of the worst in my 24 years of fishing,” he said. “This year so far is great. Right now salmon fishing is some of the best in the lake.”

In contrast, Keeran said fishermen on the Michigan side of the lake are struggling to find salmon.

Like Kisley, Keeran said salmon fishing is good now because of an ample supply of “bait,” the young alewives they crave.

“Salmon follow their food,” he said. “There’s a lot of bait fish here.”

“Right now, salmon fishing is some of the best in the lake.” — Josh Keeran,
charter boat captain

Sure seems like there is quite a King fishery setting up for the month of August out there right now, and that's at quite a few ports around the lake I'm reading. In some of the other forums in MI, the bite keeps getting better and better, including a 29.9lber taken over the weekend in South Haven. Of course, the size is directly attributed to the amount of food they are finding, whichever age class ales that might be.

I got to doing some wishful thinking over the weekend: since nobody on the Fed level seems to care or want to control the Laker populations, maybe there will be such an over-abundance of wild strain kings out there that it won't even matter how much the stocking is cut back? Wouldn't it be interesting if 5 years from now the conversation turns into them saying we can't control the king populations because now there are too many wild fish in the lake! Of course, if there is no food left in the lake 5 years from now none of it will matter anyhow. I guess we'll deal with that overabundance of kings problem if it ever happened, but knowing the fall stream returns and just the overall fall fishery in general last year, I don't think anybody expected this year to be as great as it has been so far.

Speaking of natural reproduction of salmon, does alewives have the same effect on salmon as Lakers, making them sterile? If so, then majority of salmon can't be naturally reproducing in numbers like the dnr says. Mike