Cohos are usually one of our state's surest bets when fishing Lake Michigan during the spring. This fine specimen was caught by Tom Berg of Dyer. Photo by Mike Schoonveld

It used to be said there were five major species of fish in Lake Michigan of interest to anglers: two species of salmon and three kinds of trout. The trout and salmon are all still present, but this year I'm going to add two more species to this Big Lake forecast because Indiana anglers consider them important: smallmouth bass and perch. The popularity of smallmouths has zoomed in the past few years, and perch, despite a long history, almost dropped out of the picture a few years ago.

SMALLMOUTH BASS
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Are smallmouth bass a recent addition to the game fish population in Indiana's part of Lake Michigan or have they always been there? Some people side with the chicken theory, some with the egg theory, some with the recent arrival theory. Others will claim that smallmouths have been around for decades along Indiana's part of Lake Michigan. Regardless of who is correct, smallies are certainly here now, and the secret is out. Many days, from Hammond to Michigan City, there are as many bass boats slipped into the lake as there are boats equipped with downriggers, planer boards and anglers bent on trout and salmon. Luckily, Lake Michigan is huge and even with bass angler numbers doubled or tripled over the last few years, the lake is never crowded.

For the most part, finding the bass is easy. Smallmouths and rocks go hand in hand. Lake Michigan's lakeshore teems with rocks put there to guard lakefront property from the lake's sometimes oceanlike waves. In LaPorte County, the detached breakwall at the mouth of Trail Creek is prime territory; but don't overlook the lighthouse pier, or the structure along the shore of the NIPSCO electricity plant. In Porter County, the rocks at the mouth of Burns Waterway yield plenty of bass. Anglers will fish the entire outer wall of the Port of Indiana (no fishing inside the port since the 9-11 terror attack) and just to the east is a small rock "island" locally called "the donut," which always produces.

There are almost too many places in Lake County to innumerate. Put it this way. From the Lake/Porter county line is a couple miles of sand beach. There are another few hundred yards of beach at East Chicago and about the same amount at Whiting. The rest of the shoreline is rocks and smallmouth territory.

Smallmouths feed on two things in Lake Michigan: gobies and crayfish. Brownish-colored tube jigs mimic both and are the top two presentations.

Modern bass boats are made to handle surprisingly rough waters. That doesn't mean they can handle anything Lake Michigan can dish out. Watch the weather and choose carefully the days you go.

YELLOW PERCH
Lake Michigan's perch stocks will probably never fully recover from the environmental problems and over-harvest by commercial nets, which collapsed the fishery in the early 1990s. By the time the commercials were curbed, the perch population was skewed about 97 to 3, males vs. females. The nets are gone, but the negative environmental influences, including invasive species, such as zebra mussels and gobies, won't go away. Still, a couple of decent hatches have returned the perch to at least a shadow of their former abundance.

The exciting part about "perch-jerking" on Lake Michigan these days is that since the commercial nets have not been present for almost a decade, truly large specimens are now being caught on a regular basis. Yellow perch measuring in excess of 12 inches and weighing over 1 pound aren't that hard to find these days.