3 Kings & A Coho

  As of lately I have been overwhelmed by extra work resulting in no fishing time. I am certainly not complaining as the extra money rolls in, but bummed to here of all the great fishing opportunities that I have missed out on. With the extreme temps and the drought this year the fishing has been more exciting because the fish have become a little more predictable so to speak.

  This past Sunday I was able to finally make my maiden voyage out on the big pond, aka Lake Michigan, with my good friend Scott. Scotty has had a rough year on the walleye tour so he has turned back to his roots on Lake Michigan Salmon and Trout fishing for the time being.

  I arrived at Scott's home at 4 a.m. on Sunday and hooked the boat up and off we went. We headed to Winthrop Harbor and arrived around 5a.m. There was a line of boats waiting to be dropped into the lake when we had arrived. After a short wait, the boat was wet and we steamed out of the harbor while setting up our rods. After the no wake, we hammered down on the throttle heading out past the third hill. We started with a South East troll  in 100 FOW heading out to the 140 FOW depth. Fish where lit up all over the depthfinder in the 50-65 FOW range. We set Downriggers first with dodgers and flies and ran a slider line with a spoon attached about 10 feet above the ball. Dowriggers where set at 73 feet and 82 feet. When trolling you have to figure your bait attached to the ball is about 10% shallower than what the initial depth of the ball is do to the boat moving. Next we set are leadcore lines with 1 oz. snap weights and spoons out about 250-280 feet of line. Last but not least we ran out dipsy's with one set at 50 fow and the other running at about 60fow.  Lines where set and we ran a speed of 2.2-2.4mph.

  After a short time the first reel started screaming out line. Fish on! I quickly grabbed the rod and started reeling slowly, to find our first fish of the day to be about a 3lbs. King Salmon. He came on a downrigger line that was set at 73 feet. We quickly unhooked, tossed in the cooler, and reset our line. Not more than 20 mins. later the dipsy set at 50fow started screaming and this time we knew it was a bigger fish.Scott reeled and I netted the big fish of the day, a 10 lbs. King. Reset and back to the grind. Some time passed before we found our next fish which was a coho that came in 142 fow suspended about 55 feet down. We had a few misses here and there, but we managed to catch our 4th fish of the day at about 10:30a.m. It ended up being a nice healthy 3lbs. king.

   All in all we went 4 for 7 Sunday morning which was a success in my book after talking to a few of the fisherman in the parking lot and a good charter captain friend of ours. The charter only boated 12 fish and was running 15 rods, another group only ended up with 2, and some other gents got the skunk. 1 of our fish was caught in 120 fow water and the other 3 where caught in the 140-145fow water range with all of the fish hanging in the 50-65 foot water column. It was a great day on the water, we got plenty of sun, and plenty of fresh fish to eat for the next few weeks. If you ever get a chance to get out on Lake Michigan for some Salmon fishing, I highly recommend it.

 Hot bait for the day was a silver flasher with a little boy blue tube fly running behind it. We only got one of our fish on a spoon. It seemed that the dodger and fly was the hot ticket.