A great day on a Great Lake

BAILEYS HARBOR, Wis. — A few weeks ago near the end of June, my buddy Randy Randall and I decided we should take a salmon fishing trip to Lake Michigan.

"The coho bite has been on fire," Randall said. "Salmon John has been catching limits almost every day since May. I'll give him a call."

Randall met John Peters about 20 years ago through a mutual acquaintance. Back then, Peters was an engineer/scientist in the paper industry with a passion for salmon fishing and a willingness to share his boat and expertise with others. Now that he's retired, Peters is relentless in his pursuit of the silvery torpedos that prowl Lake Michigan's western shoreline.

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And he's really good at it.

The history of Lake Michigan salmon is fascinating and complicated. The first recorded effort to introduce them in the Great Lakes occurred in 1873, but the species didn't fare well until the mid-1960s when Michigan fisheries biologists began looking for a solution to massive and unpleasant die-offs of overabundant alewives that would also establish a sportfishing opportunity on the big lake.

They planted large numbers of salmon, mostly cohos, hatched from eggs provided by the states of Washington, Oregon and Alaska. Since about 1969, Michigan has collected eggs from mature Lake Michigan salmon in the fall and provided them to Wisconsin for incubation. Once they hatch, they are reared for 13 to 15 months and stocked from Kenosha to the south as far north as Gills Rock.

Today, trout and salmon angling on Lake Michigan is a $7 billion industry that is carefully managed by multiple state, federal and tribal agencies. If the alewife population decreases, fewer salmon (and especially the larger chinooks) are stocked. When alewife numbers increase, so does salmon stocking. Water quality also has improved over the years, leading to more natural reproduction that also factors into stocking decisions.

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According to data from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, stocking topped 2 million chinooks for the first time in 1978 with a peak of 2.9 million in 1984. Coho stockings have typically been in the half-million range. From 2013-19, the number of chinooks released ranged from 770,000-845,000 and coho from 363,000-539,000 before an overall uptick in stocking numbers again beginning in 2020.

Anglers have been enjoying that bounty. Wisconsin estimated the 2024 harvest at 210,000 cohos and 160,000 chinooks — the most since 2012.

Randall tries to join "Salmon John" for a day or two of fishing each summer. More often than not, they've been successful outings, so we made the trip to Green Bay with high hopes — weather permitting.

When Peters picked us up at our motel at 3:15 a.m., we had no idea where we were headed. Early in the season, he was on a hot bite at Port Washington, Wis., about 90 miles south. Gradually, the fish worked their way north to ports like Sheboygan and Manitowoc in search of cooler water and forage like alewives and smelt, and "Salmon John" stayed on their tails.

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Mobility is one of the main reasons he downsized from a larger boat like those operated by Lake Michigan charter fishing services to an Alumacraft Trophy 185.

"We're gonna have some north wind today," Peters said. "We're going up to Baileys Harbor where we'll be protected a little bit."

It was a cool morning in the upper 50s as we motored out of the harbor. When we hit 90 feet of water four or five miles offshore, Peters put the boat on auto pilot at about 3 mph and began setting lines on planer boards, slide-divers and downriggers. Our lures consisted of dodger-fly combinations and spoons rigged on everything from wire and braid to monofilament. Snap-weights were added to a couple of set-ups.

Peters has it figured out.

Just a few minutes into the morning, one of the slide-diver rods began bucking wildly and screeching line. Randall eventually brought a 3-year-old chinook (king) salmon that weighed 11 or 12 pounds to the net.

As Peters fine-tuned the spread by adjusting depths and changing baits, our catch rate increased.

It was Randall's turn again when one of the rods doubled over and an angry salmon headed for Michigan. After 10 minutes of battle, it was hard to tell who was going to wear out first.

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"We're gonna need another barrel on this one," Randall said in reference to the movie "Jaws."

Randall won out, but not without a measure of calamity when the salmon dove under the boat near the motor. Somehow, Peters managed to get our largest fish of the day, a 21-pound chinook, into the net.

Around 11 a.m. with the waves growing larger, we headed back to port with an impressive catch. We went 13-for-15 with one big king that broke off right behind the boat and another that threw the hook. Our count featured nine kings, three rainbow trout and one coho.

It was Peters' first trip of the year out of Baileys Harbor, and even he wasn't sure what to expect.

"Honestly, I thought maybe we'd get five or six," he said on the ride back to Green Bay.

He might not admit it, but there's a reason he's known as "Salmon John."