Cohos are well off shore in Lake Michigan this spring
http://www.mlive.com/outdoors/statew...990.xml&coll=1
Sunday, May 14, 2006 By Bob Gwizdz
MICHIGAN CITY, Ind. -- It used to be that the drill for spring coho here was pretty simple: Head out of the pierheads, turn right or left, and start trolling.
Not this year. This spring, the bulk of the charter boat captains working out of this southern Lake Michigan port are heading off shore, well into Michigan water. So when captain Carl "Fuzzy" Stopczynski left port the other day as part of a four-boat charter, he ran for a solid hour, out to 130 feet of water, before he set lines.
"Right now, there's just no fish in (shallow) at all," said Stopczynski, a public safety officer at South Bend Regional Airport when he isn't captaining his 40-foot Trojan. "The biggest reason, we think, is there's just no bait. There's no food in there for them.
"Historically, they're in 50 foot of water and in."
The bait (i.e.. alewife) situation is a hot topic on Lake Michigan. Federal surveys show the alewife population is down, so much so that the Lake Michigan states agreed to cut chinook salmon plants in order to allow the alewife population to recover. But some captains believe there's more bait in the lake than the feds think, it's just out in the middle of the lake where the surveys aren't finding it.
Either way, there's plenty of fish out there in the middle. The first twenty minutes of trolling in 42-degree water put five cohos on ice. And the other three boats were doing even better than Stopczynski.
But there was a reason for that, Stopczynski said. He was fishing a steelhead pattern, trolling largely high in the water column with spoons on in-line planer boards, moving along at a little better than 3 miles an hour.
"If we were targeting coho, we'd be under 2.5 (mph)," Stopczynski said as he put the eleventh coho of the morning in the box. "If I was fishing for cohos, I'd fish more body baits and more dodgers and flies. But you've got to run those slower and the steelhead generally want it faster."
Stopczynski was targeting steelhead because the future of the coho fishery in the south end of the lake could be in jeopardy.
In a move to balance the fisheries division budget, Michigan's Department of Natural Resources cut its coho production in half for two years, reserving all Lake Michigan coho for the Platte River plant, where the brood stock is taken. In addition to that, Indiana lost a good portion of last year's production because of a hatchery rehabilitation project.
In the meantime, Indiana boosted steelhead production, stocking 600,000 in the lake instead of its usual 130,000. And that has the captains thinking steelhead.
"We ought to have good steelhead fishing in the next three or four years," Stopczynski said. "But we may not have the coho."
Part of the rationale for Michigan cutting coho plants is data showing that the bulk of the fish are caught by out-of-state ports. But the Michigan City crew doesn't see it that way.
"That's why all the Michigan boats are down here in April," Stopczynski said. "There's probably an extra 10 Michigan boats in our harbor (Washington Park). Ninety percent of our charters out of Michigan City are in Michigan. I sell four times as many Michigan licenses as I do Indiana."
We boated our 15th coho -- we had five anglers aboard and the limit in Michigan water is three apiece -- and Stopczynski put his boat into a hard turn. Before he'd straightened it out to begin the run back to shore (we were more than 20 miles out of the port), we hooked and landed three steelhead.
That, Stopczynski said, illustrated his point about trolling speed.
"When you make that hard turn, those outside baits are probably running 5 miles an hour," he said. "Sometimes that autopilot can be your worse enemy. It keeps you going in the same direction, but sometimes you've got to zig and zag, speed up and slow down."
We wound up with five steelhead to go with our 15 coho. Our trip was 4 1/2 hours dock to dock, nearly half of it running time.
The coho fishery on the south end of the lake appears to be in good shape this year, but what happens in the future remains to be seen. For Stopczynski, the steelhead he found at the end of our trip is a focus point.
"Once you find a pack of off-shore steelhead, they'll generally be there for a month," he said.
And so will he.
To contact Stopczynski, call (574) 607-2542.
Cohos are well off shore in Lake Michigan this spring
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