Wisconsin - Early salmon reports raise season's hopes

[GLF]

It's hard to imagine topping last year's record-breaking salmon catches on Lake Michigan, but it could happen.

Reports of an occasional chinook or steelhead taken by trollers 3 to 6 miles offshore began to trickle in weeks ago.

While the deep-water haunts are producing, some anglers have been catching fish even closer the past couple weeks — right off the piers some mornings.

Ideal water temperatures, plentiful bait and stirred-up water from rain and runoff are possible factors in the near-shore success at spots like Algoma, Kewaunee, Two Rivers and Manitowoc.

Many anglers say they're seeing plenty of alewives in the clear water off the pier, on their fish locators while trolling and in the bellies of salmon they fillet.

Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist and avid angler Paul Peeters of Sturgeon Bay has heard the encouraging reports, but isn't ready to make a proclamation that everything is back on track.

"The only thing that's guaranteed in Lake Michigan is change," Peeters said. "We will continue to adapt our management to the ever-changing conditions, but we have no effective control over the number of exotic species that keep coming in, or things like the weather."

Chinook salmon catches have improved steadily the past four years. More than 400,000 kings were caught last year, nearly 250,000 combined off Kewaunee, Door and Manitowoc counties.

Stocking peaked at more than 2.7 million chinooks a year three times between 1984 and 1989. However, those salmon nearly ate themselves out of their favored food; an oily, exotic forage fish known as an alewife.

There have been three substantial stocking cuts since, in 1991, 1999 and 2006. With this year's 21 percent reduction, Wisconsin will be stocking fewer than half as many chinooks as it did in the mid-1980s.

Peeters said an increase in natural reproduction on the Michigan side of the lake makes it difficult for fish managers to keep salmon numbers in line with the forage base. Additionally, an alewife crash in Lake Huron in recent years resulted in an unknown number of salmon migrating into Lake Michigan.

Declining body weights and fat content in salmon in recent years was a red flag to Peeters and other biologists that the forage base again may be in trouble.

The last time alewife populations crashed in the late 1980s, stressed chinooks began succumbing to bacterial kidney disease. It took nearly a decade to get the fishery back on track.

"We first stocked fewer salmon within the past couple weeks," Peeters said. "The first year, they don't even eat alewives, so the true impact of our reduced stocking effort won't be seen for several years."

Peeters is cautiously optimistic about a combination of lakewide acoustic and bottom trawl assessments last fall that showed good numbers of young alewives, rainbow smelt and yellow perch.

"But we've frequently seen good year classes of alewives that don't make it to the next year," he said.

Peeters said the size and condition of the alewives is more important than the numbers.

"Even a fairly small alewife year-class can bring off a huge hatch if conditions are correct," he said. "But then, they have to be able to find enough to eat, too. And we have no control over that, or how cold the winter is, or any of a number of other factors."