Big reels loaded with copper wire and lead-core line are favorite choices of today’s offshore anglers. Photo by Mike Schoonveld.

Indiana’s Great Lakes fishermen used to despise August. Sure, you could pull a fish or two out of the depths, if you were lucky, persistent and in the right place at the right time; but great fishing action and full coolers were rare. Surprisingly, though, for the past couple of summers, Indiana salmon fishermen have experienced phenomenal success in August. Why the change?

Let’s start with the changing face of Indiana’s charter boat fleet. The number of registered charter operators has remained the same over the years -- about 50, give or take a few each year -- but many of the “old-timers,” the guys who helped pioneer Indiana’s Lake Michigan fishing, have dropped out of the business and have been replaced by new captains with newer boats who are fishing in new locations.

When Indiana’s Lake Michigan trout and salmon programs started in the 1970s, Michigan City, with a well-developed harbor, was the home to most of the state’s charter captains. A few captains found dock spaces along the shores of Burns Waterway in Portage. None of these captains were located in Lake County because there were only a couple of small, private marinas located there.

Though a similar number of captains are still available in Indiana, the fleet is now split among all three of Indiana’s Lake Michigan counties. There are still plenty of captains calling Michigan City home, a few still operate out of Portage, but the Lake County fleet is flourishing, based at the modern marina facilities at East Chicago and Hammond.

As the Lake County fleet increased, so did the amount of exploring offshore of Lake County. It was too far for the Lake County skippers to travel to where the Michigan City and Portage charters historically fished. The Lake County guys looked for, and found, offshore bonanzas closer to home for themselves.

FISHING THE SHOALS
The area they discovered is called the Indiana Shoals on official charts of the lake. The shoals are part of a naturally occurring sandbar, which runs from the shore between East Chicago and Whiting on out into the lake for almost 15 miles. Nearshore, the top of the shallow bar may be only 16 to 20 feet deep, dropping into 30 feet of water. At the far end, it may be 60 feet deep, dropping into 80 feet of water. It’s along this drop that summer king salmon are found.

Were these schools of salmon always there lurking along the edge of the shoals? Perhaps they were. Others suspect the recent August bounty found along the Indiana Shoals comes from the number of naturally reproduced chinook salmon now living in Lake Michigan.

For the first decades of the Lake Michigan salmon program, solely the number of hatchery fish the Lake Michigan states could produce determined the number of chinook salmon in the lake. Most of the streams feeding into the lake were too warm, too turbid, too polluted or lacked suitable substrate for salmon to successfully spawn. That has changed.

Even here in Indiana the tributary streams have been cleaned up and in many areas the bottoms have been scoured clean to the natural gravel substrate as soil erosion measures have been instituted. Areas like these are where natural reproduction of chinook salmon can occur. To a similar extent in Wisconsin, the same thing is happening, and in the state of Michigan, there are more naturally produced chinook salmon coming into the lake than baby kings originating from hatcheries.

In short, there are now more chinook salmon in Lake Michigan than ever before. It’s easy to postulate the increased catch of chinooks is directly attributable to the number of chinooks in the lake.

TACTICAL CHANGES
Most kinds of fishing undergo a steady evolution over time. Gear improves, tactics evolve, and sometimes it’s almost cyclical as old almost forgotten tactics are resurrected. It’s the new captains and private sport-fishermen that have recently taken up Great Lakes fishing who often lead the way.