Photo by Terry Rudnick

Indiana owns just a sliver of Lake Michigan -- about 3 percent of the entire immense lake. However, even a small wedge cut from a large pie can be an ample portion. Judging from the number of people who head to the big lake regularly, there are plenty of Hoosiers who partake from Indiana's small slice of Lake Michigan's large pie.

That's why each year this magazine offers up predictions about what Hoosier fans of Lake Michigan can expect. The predictions are based on science, history, and in part, just gut feelings from fishing experts and biologists. So, slap on your windbreaker. Let's take a quick overview of each species and how each is destined to be a major player for the 2007 season's action on the big lake.

COHO SALMON
If stocking numbers have anything to do with how good the coho fishing will be in 2007, this should be a bumper crop year. There were no shutdowns, budget crisis or hatchery accidents and each state planted cohos at their target levels of two years ago. That means more fish will be available than last year and even more cohos will be in the lake next year as well.

Understand, only 3-year-old cohos figure into Lake Michigan's harvest each year because cohos have only a three-year life cycle. The first year of their life is spent in a hatchery. During that year, they grow from tiny fry to about 7 inches in length and are usually stocked in the late fall. They don't grow much over the winter and by the time anglers start fishing the spring coho and brown trout run, they've only put on another few inches in length, at best -- and a 10-inch coho doesn't interest many people. By late summer and fall, they will have grown to 14 inches or larger, but in the fall, most anglers are after much bigger fare. So there's not much hope for getting any real action out of the 2-year-old cohos.

It's when Lake Michigan cohos are in their third and final year of life they become one of the staples of the southern lake fishery. That means all a "statistical" fisherman has to do is check back to 2005 to see how many coho were planted to learn how many are potentially in the lake to catch in 2007.

The good news is the stocking numbers in 2005 were normal. Hatchery problems and money problems have affected the number of cohos in the lake in years past and will be affecting the number of cohos planted in the lake in years to come. None of those shortcomings will be in play this year.

Luckily, many other factors besides the number of fish stocked team up to produce a fair, good or excellent coho fishery during any one particular season. There have been excellent years with relatively low stocking numbers, and only fair years with full stocking numbers. Given a choice, however, most anglers would opt for a full contingent of fish being stocked.