Snippet: Mike Gnatkowski, "The chinooks came back about two weeks ago, and it has been very good. The other day, I had 14 by 8 a.m. We're seeing some nice cohos, too. It's nothing to go out and catch three species in a morning. And we're catching a lot of small lake trout that we have to throw back, 12-17 inchers. That's a great sign for the future."
Salmon make resurgence
Boom sparked by hearty alewives
LUDINGTON -- Tom Rozich was one very nervous fisheries biologist last fall, worried that fisheries managers in the states around Lake Michigan had waited too long before cutting back salmon stocking. He feared that Lake Michigan might see the kind of catastrophic salmon collapse that had occurred in Lake Huron.
"I was really scared last year," said Rozich, who works in the Department of Natural Resources' Cadillac office. "The salmon were lean and gaunt-looking, and you couldn't find baitfish. We knew we had a good hatch of alewives in 2005, so we just kept our fingers crossed that we'd have a mild or at least a normal winter and spring."
This time, biologists and Lake Michigan anglers caught a break. A mild winter and early spring resulted in extremely high survival rates for those young alewives, producing a summertime prey bonanza that has seen the average Lake Michigan chinook salmon this year running about 20-25% bigger than in 2005.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/a...607270383/1058
Lake Michigan - Salmon make resurgence
Linear Mode
