Mike Schoonveld of Morocco admires a beautifully marked bonus brown trout, which was caught during the summer while targeting salmon. Photo by Tom Berg.

Lake Michigan is famous for the quality of its salmon and trout fishing, and for good reason. Millions of fish are stocked by the Lake Michigan border states every year, and the lucky fishermen who pursue them catch huge numbers of those trout and salmon each season. And Hoosier anglers are always eager to get in on the action as well!

As good as the Lake Michigan fishery is, however, there has been some rough water recently. In 2005, the Mixsawbah State Fish Hatchery was closed for urgently needed repairs. The hatchery was closed from September 2005 until September 2006. Since it was a planned shutdown, the hatchery schedules were manipulated to minimize the loss of fish production.

According to Brian Breidert, a Lake Michigan fisheries biologist for the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), the revamped hatchery went back into production right on time. “Mixsawbah was back online by the end of September 2006, with the first stocking after construction taken place in April of 2007 (winter steelhead yearlings), followed by chinook salmon in May 2007.”

That information was music to the ears of Lake Michigan anglers, who are always happy to hear that hatchery production is going well and that plenty of fish will be stocked in the lake for them to catch!

COHO SALMON
Coho salmon are one of the first species of fish that many anglers target in the spring. Winter fishermen often pursue brown trout, but spring cohos are the quarry for most anglers early in the boating season. In most years, when the cohos are in, limit catches are the norm -- not the exception.

Although coho fishing in the spring of 2007 started off a little slow, it picked up considerably in May. Captain Mike Schoonveld is one of Indiana’s Lake Michigan charter captains. He reported that last year’s early summer coho action was good on his boat Brother Nature.

“The spring fishing was slow because there was no bait around,” he said. “But in the middle of May, the alewives showed up out on the Indiana shoals, and the cohos followed them. The bait stayed there the rest of the summer and we had excellent fishing for cohos.”

Unfortunately, the typically good spring fishing in Indiana waters may start a bit slow this year, too. Because of the shutdown of the Mixsawbah Hatchery, the Indiana DNR was only able to stock coho salmon from the Bodine Hatchery in 2006. A total of just over 79,000 cohos were stocked that year, and 2008 is when the bulk of those fish will return to our spring fishery.

Luckily, spring coho fishing in Indiana is less dependent on Indiana’s stocking numbers and more dependent on water temperature and the annual migration patterns of cohos in general. In the spring, Indiana hosts the warmest water in the lake, so all of the cohos stocked by Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin migrate to our shorelines to take advantage of the warm water. (Continued)

Once the fish arrive, they’ll cruise around and search for schools of baitfish that are also attracted by the warm water. That’s when most boaters target them. Trolling bright-colored crankbaits and dodger-and-fly combinations is the standard procedure, and limit catches are typical. Limits of cohos may be harder to come by this spring than usual, but they are still very possible.

Since the Mixsawbah Hatchery came back online in September of 2006, biologist Breidert reports that Indiana’s coho stockings have returned to normal.