steeliebob

I got 11 of them a week ago up north a couple of hogs in the bunch. A couple of good frys worth mmmm.

So I can have a freezer full of lake trout, ha no thanks. They do make a good garden though.

At 2:00 pm yesterday the water was like glass in St Ignace not a wave anywhere. I wondered where it all went.

Everyone seems to think that the lake trout are there for native american commercial fishermen. There has to be a market for them otherwise they are no good. Lately there has not been much of a market for them. My neighbor is a commercial fisherman and he is always asking me if I want a lake trout.

Spawning steelhead are very much like a salmon they will take advantage of river conditions. If a river is high and muddy a steelhead will go upstream 100 miles or more in a couple of days if it can. They will spawn fast and use the high muddy water to escape and go back into the lake. Once the water is back to normal you will see lots of redds with few fish on them. Some of these fish will hole up so instead of fishing gravel get on the holes.

With less salmon migrating the fall steelhead are coming into the river later in the fall. The ones that I am catching are much larger but the numbers of fish are down. In the 1990's I used to land 10+ river steelhead pretty much every trip. Right now it is a skunk with a few caught here and there. I don't think that I have landed a steelhead under 5 lbs this fall. Not a problem catching spring steelhead I think that they come to Northern Michigan from all over the state due to colder and higher water. I know of places where if a guy wants to hike in to untouched waters you can see spawning steelhead by the thousands. They are there you just have to find them.

Alewives are an Atlantic Ocean fish. So how does a Pacific Ocean fish become so dependent on them? Also the Chinook and Coho have great spawning success in the Canadian and UP waters. Their success was so great that the Canadians quit planting them about 10 or so years ago. As for Lake Trout I keep every legal one that I can boat. I don't eat many of them but I find someone that will. If they want to get rid of the lake trout lower the size limit, increase the catch limit, and expand the season. There is no reason that they should have a closed season on them except maybe November and December.

Walleye and Pike have treated me good so far this summer. The salmon fishing in the straits has gone south so I hope that there is some steelhead to be caught.

I think that they are including a number of hypothermia cases to get the numbers up for their cause. If they save just one persons life their cause is very worthwhile.

You can count the number of fishing boats at the St Ignace boat launch on any given Saturday on three fingers or less. I have done it several times this summer.

When the bigger pike hit I thought I had a salmon for the first 15 minutes of the battle. It made a couple of screaming runs into the lake peeling off 100 yards of 8lb test in seconds. Then there was several shorter runs and eventually I saw what I hooked into.

Most of the guys on this site do not remember when alewives were out of control. They used heavy equipment on a daily basis to clean them off from the beaches in southern lake Michigan. Every wave deposited thousands of dead alewives, gulls could not eat them fast enough. At that time you could not find a gull unless it was on the shoreline eating alewives. I have seen them 3 feet deep and 25 feet back on the shore.

Looking at the postings on this site and other sites there seems to be plenty of alewives. If the DNR continues to stock less kings for the next two or three years the alewives will over run the lakes again. By the time the DNR gets back to 5 million salmon it will be too late because it takes them a couple of years before they do any damage to the alewives.