Salmon fishing in Michigan
Published 10:59 am Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Here’s a report from Eric Sharp of the Detroit Free Press on salmon fishing in Michigan. It’s pretty good in the Great Lakes this year, as it’s been in the Northwest. This story is about fly fishing, but some of the anglers are fishing with flies, but not fly rods.
BALDWIN, Mich. ̵
2; This is amazing. It’s a stunning late summer afternoon, the pools and riffles on the Pere Marquette River are full of fresh-run salmon, and yet I count just four anglers in a three-quarter-mile stretch of river.
Three of them are Hansons from Kalamazoo, brothers Dave and Rick and cousin Ro
n, using spinning rods to pitch weighted fly rigs to a long, dark pool on the opposite side of the river.
“I’m mostly a fly fisherman, but this works, too,” Dave Hanson said. “It’s all fun.”
Two big chinooks slide out of the pool and take up station on a shallow gravel bar about 30 feet above Dave Hanson, and he begins casting so that the fly slides close by the male fish that holds a bit behind the female.
On the fourth cast the salmon turns to intercept the fly and Hanson’s rod bends hard as the fish feels the hook and starts a run upstream. Then it reverses direction and charges downstream into the fast current below him, making the drag on his reel sing a tune beloved by anglers.
“We’ve fished this stretch for 20 years,” Hanson said. “Most people fish upstream or downstream, but we like this part of the river. There are a lot of fish, and you can see there’s no competition.”
The trollers on Lake Michigan gave us a hint this summer of what we could expect when salmon started coming into the streams to spawn in late August. The trolling fishermen not only caught more fish than in the past six or seven years, the chinooks were huge, including 30-pound-plus specimens that haven’t been seen for a decade.
The salmon had benefitted from increased numbers of baitfish, especially small alewives from a couple of good hatches, and river fishermen will get the benefit of that bounty for the next six weeks or so.
Edie Walker comes from South Bend, Ind., to fish the Muskegon River for three or four days each fall, and though he had to come a week early this year because of business obligations, “It has been phenomenal. There are lots of fish, but what’s really amazing is how big they are.”
“The last three years a big fish has been a 12-pounder. This year there are about as many fish over 20 pounds as under 20,” he said. “I’ve been doing best on Bomber Long A and Rapala crankbaits. People who say salmon won’t bite a lure after they come into a stream are nuts. When we’re throwing plugs, we sometimes see a fish turn and chase after it for 20, 30 feet before hooking up.
“The bright fish (freshly arrived from the lake) are the most aggressive, and if you can land one out of four, you’re doing pretty good. My biggest so far was 28 pounds, but one of the guys we fish with got a 33-pound male. He fought it for about 40 minutes,” Walker said.
I fished four streams in three days and caught 15- to 25-pound salmon in all of them. I was fly fishing, and the most effective lures for fresh-run fish were big wet flies, Michigan skunks and various muddler minnows.
The skunks were best in the shallow riffles, mostly because the black bodies of the flies stood out and were easy to follow as they drifted downstream.
I used the muddlers in the pools, usually a cone-head version because the extra weight helped get the flies down a little deeper. I also tied a No. 14 green caddis or No. 12 black stonefly nymph to the bend of the muddler hook with a 12-inch piece of fluorocarbon, but most of the strikes came on the muddler.
A simplified leader works well for salmon fishing, because this kind of casting usually doesn’t call for delicacy or pinpoint accuracy. My 8-weight fly lines all have a 12-inch leader butt of 30-pound monofilament, to which I attach a 5-foot piece of 20-pound fluorocarbon with a loop-to-loop connection.
Tie a 3-foot piece of 14-pound fluoro to the 20 pound with a blood knot and use another blood knot to attach a 10-pound fluorocarbon tippet to the end of the leader.
The 10-pound fluorocarbon tippet usually is fine enough that it doesn’t spook fish. But when I fished the Muskegon at the end of a weekend when the salmon had been harassed unmercifully, I drew more strikes by switching to a 6-pound fluoro tippet, although that also meant I broke off more fish.
One was a huge, kype-jawed male that almost certainly was the 30-pounder I’ve been trying to land on a fly rod for 40 years. It took a muddler deep in a pool and reacted with a leap 4 feet above the water and landed with a splash big enough to fill a bathtub.
We duked it out for 15 minutes, with me gaining a foot or two here and the salmon gaining three or four there until it was finally able to run under a deadfall and break off.
I can’t wait to go back and meet his cousin.
