Nice fish

[bigweenie]

BY ERIC SHARP

DETROIT FREE PRESS OUTDOORS WRITER

Filed Under

Sports

Outdoors

Lake Michigan

Royal Oak

MANISTEE -- If you dream of catching a master angler salmon, Lake Michigan and its tributaries in September should give you the best shot at that goal fishermen have had in the past five years.

Nearly as many master angler chinooks have come from Lake Michigan in August this year (three) as were recorded in all of 2010 (four). And Lynn Thoma, who keeps the master angler records for the Department of Natural Resources, said most of the record salmon don't get submitted for her approval until September and October.

The fish on the leaderboard entering Wednesday was a 37.1-pound chinook landed Aug. 22 near Manistee by Tim Shreves of Fowlerville aboard a 24-foot boat owned by his father-in-law, Rick Schulte of Royal Oak, with Schulte's son, Derek, acting as mate.

And minutes before, they had landed another record-angler fish that they cut up to eat, Rick Schulte said, "because the Mickey Mouse scale we were using on the boat was under by about 3 or 4 pounds, but we didn't find out until we took the big fish in to be weighed on a certified scale."

Schulte, 57, began fishing for salmon out of Manistee with his dad 30 years ago and says, "I figure that if you add up all the money I've spent over the years chasing salmon, that fish cost me about $5,000 an inch. But it was worth every penny."

The big chinook was caught on a herring strip "meat rig," a natural bait that has been a mainstay on Lake Ontario for decades and is growing in popularity on Lake Michigan.

Schulte said he and his crew went out on a charter trip with Manistee captain Paul Schlafley of Riverside Charters to learn how to fish with this method, "then we went out on our own and followed his program. Once we knew what we were doing, we just tore 'em up" using a :thumb:Big Weenie UV ice meat system.

"It was amazing. We could hardly get the baits down before fish were on them," Schulte said. "We had four rods out, and there were times when we had three or four going at once."

Lake Michigan's prey-fish stocks have declined drastically in the past decade, especially alewives that are the preferred prey for chinook salmon. But recent surveys have showed large numbers of juvenile alewives, and anglers say the big chinooks will eat them as readily as adult alewives.

"The salmon we caught were all spitting up real small alewives and shad," Schulte said. "But the salmon were all nice fish, 16 pounds or better. We limited out in 3 1/2 hours."

Gordon Butler is a Grand Rapids angler who has been fishing out of several Lake Michigan ports this summer in his 23-foot center console, and he said that "it has been the best year we've seen for salmon, both numbers and sizes, since about 2005.

"We went through a few years there where not only were the fish smaller, there weren't as many. And the cohos just became midgets, maybe 3-4 pounds on average.

"This spring we started fishing cohos out of St. Joseph in May, and (they) already were 5-6 pounds. And when we moved up to Grand Haven in July, we were getting 15- to 20-pound chinooks, compared to a 10- to 12-pound average last summer."

Butler said he has been putting his boat away in early September for the past three or four years because "it wasn't worth the fuel costs for the kind of fish we were seeing."

"But I'm going to fish this September as long as the salmon is hitting," he said. "I figure we have a real good chance at getting a couple of fish over 30 (pounds), and fighting a salmon like that is an amazing experience."

Schulte said the 37-pound salmon taken on his boat "took off 250 feet of braided line, and I had the drags on the reels screwed down pretty tight because of the weight of the rigs we were towing.

"I had rotator cuff surgery last year, and my shoulder was already killing me when that fish hit. By the time it stopped running, it was about 450 feet behind the boat. I looked at my son-in-law and said, 'I think it's your turn.' That's why it took 45 minutes for Tim to bring it in.

"Derek took over the wheel when I got ready to net the fish. I didn't realize how big it was, so I picked up the walleye net. I could barely get a third of it into the net, and then it rolled out, so I leaned over and gilled it," Schulte said.

"I had my hand stuck right in its mouth, and those teeth hurt, but I wasn't about to let go and held on until we got it into the big net."

Schulte said he hopes his fish holds its place as the biggest Michigan salmon of the year, "but I'd kind of like to see some get a 40-pounder, too. I wouldn't feel bad, because the one we caught is going up on the wall."