Kathleen Lavey

Lansing State Journal

PENTWATER - Shortly after noon on a cool sunny Thursday, the 33-foot charter boat Sportsmen came back into the Pentwater village marina carrying four happy fishermen and coolers full of still-flopping fish.

Most of their catch were plump, pink-tinged lake trout, pale bellies glistening in the bright May sun.

But after they had gotten near their quota of lake trout, Bud Perry and his friends asked Captain Brent Daggett to take them in search of chinook.

The chinook – also known as king salmon – has been the linchpin of Lake Michigan sport fishing almost since the moment it was introduced in the 1960s. It’s big, it’s aggressive and it’s good eating.

“When you’ve got a bigger fish that fights harder, you definitely get excited about it,” said Perry of Pleasant Hill, Ohio, after he clambered off Daggett’s boat. “The lake trout come right up to the surface. They don’t fight near as hard as the kings do. The kings? They don’t want any part of it.”

But after a spectacular five-decade arc, Lake Michigan’s salmon fishery appears to be in decline. Anglers are catching fewer fish, and the ones they’re getting are nowhere near the 30-pounders longtime fishermen recall from decades past.

Some fear the collapse will be as hard as the one that hit Lake Huron a dozen years ago, forcing some charter operators to move to Lake Michigan or forcing many others to go out of business. Overall, sport fishing in the Great Lakes is a $4 billion-a-year industry.

How bad is it?

In 2003, charter fishing clients in Lake Huron were catching an average of three chinook per boat, according to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources Charter Boat Survey Program survey. By 2005, that had dropped to 1.2 per boat. In 2010, it was 0.8. The number of charter operators fell by half.

It hasn’t been that bad on Lake Michigan – at least not yet.

In 2010, Lake Michigan charters averaged about 6 chinook per trip. That actually went up to 7.4 per trip in 2012, “which is just crazy high,” said Daniel O’Keefe, educator with Michigan Sea Grant, a cooperative program of the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, which supports research, outreach and education to enhance sustainable use of Great Lakes.

But that figure is an anomaly. In 2015, Lake Michigan charters averaged 2.2 chinook per trip, according to the charter survey.

“It sounds like a terrible drop, and it is,” O’Keefe said.

Fisheries managers are working to figure out how to strike a new balance among the complex web of native, invasive and introduced species in the Great Lakes, from tiny plankton to the vast proliferation of quagga mussels to lake trout and the mighty salmon. Those who fish for fun so far keep casting their lines as they wait to see how it plays out.

“The salmon experiment, if you want to call it that, is very unique,” said O’Keefe said. “Hopefully a few years from now it will still wind up being classified as a success but with just a better balance.”

1960s: Awash in alewives

In the mid-1960s, lakes Michigan and Huron were literally full of alewives, sort of a cousin to the herring that migrated through the Welland Canal in the 1940s to the Great Lakes, quickly becoming the predominant species. They’d die en masse each spring, filling beaches with stinking, silvery carcasses.

“The joke on the lakefront then was, ‘There’s a pile of them. It’s 6 inches deep, 6 feet wide and 300 miles long,” said Ron Hill, who grew up in South Haven and now captains a 31-foot charter fishing boat called “Bite Me” out of Pentwater.

Alewives weren’t the only problem. Lake trout populations had nearly collapsed in the late 1940s due to the invasive sea lamprey, an ugly, eel-like fish with a mouth like a suction cup full of teeth. It latches onto the side of a trout, salmon or other prey and literally sucks the life out of it.

Sport fishing wasn’t all that much fun, and it didn’t look like lakes Michigan and Huron could support their share of ­­­­the state’s 1,500 commercial fishing boats for much longer.

Then, Howard Tanner came back from Colorado.

Tanner, a Michigan State University grad in fisheries biology who had been working in Colorado for a dozen years, returned to his home state to head the DNR’s fisheries division.

He was told to improve it, pronto.

“I was given pretty much a blank check,” he recalled. “We had 1,500 commercial fishermen with nothing to catch. The sea lamprey had decimated the lake trout. We had thousands of dead alewives on the beach. My director said, ‘Do something.’”

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources routinely manages the numbers of fish in the Great Lakes as well as inland lakes, working to assure a workable mix of predator and prey as well as spreading popular sport fish around.

Tanner had thought about the possibility of planting coho and chinook salmon from the Pacific Northwest into the lakes, but eggs had consistently been in short supply at hatcheries in Oregon and Washington.

That changed as hatchery practices improved. When Tanner found out coho eggs were available, he was stunned.

“I sat up all night thinking what a perfect fit a salmon, a very highly desirable sport fish that ate anchovies and other fish quite similar to alewives, was for us,” he said.

“It was not only a perfect biological fit of food, temperature, spawning streams, but it was time to end commercial fishing or put aside commercial fishing and allocate the fishery potential of the Great Lakes to sport fishing,” Tanner said.

What happened next was an effort to get three states and the federal government on board as quickly as possible. Federal authorities initially objected, preferring to support commercial rather than sport fishing. The state of Washington bowed out. Michigan and Oregon made it happen. Other U.S. states and Ontario also have a say in what goes in the lakes, and also stock fish.

Eggs arrived from Oregon in December of 1964, and young fish stayed in the Platte River Hatchery for a year and a half. More than 659,000 of them were placed into the Platte River and Bear Creek, which feed Lake Michigan, in June of 1966. Chinook followed in 1967.

By September of 1967, the first cohort of coho were feasting on alewives. They were a fat, healthy sensation.

“There were thousands of boats in Platte Bay on a given weekend,” Tanner said. “There were many 15-pounders; 20-pounders were not too uncommon.”

The chinook followed suit. The salmon boom had begun.

“It was pandemonium,” Tanner recalled. “And it was fun pandemonium.”

Hill, the charter captain, remembers the first time he saw a salmon that came out of Lake Michigan. Now 59, he wasn’t even 10 years old then.

“We happened to be driving by the launch ramp and this guy steps out of the boat with two of the most beautiful fish I’ve ever seen in my life,” Hill said. “Things have never been in the same in the Hill house since.

Hatcheries play key role

Inside the DNR’s Wolf Lake hatchery, thousands of three- to four-inch chinook, most no longer than a business card is wide, wriggled and splashed in concrete troughs called races.

Hatched last fall from eggs harvested in the wild, they were about to take the ride of their lives. From this damp, industrial environment that smells distinctly of fish, they’ll be transported to new homes in rivers feeding Lake Michigan near Muskegon and Grand Haven.

Timing is critical, said Steve Vanderlaan, stocking biologist at Wolf Lake. The fish are about to undergo a physiological change, imprinting on their environment. That imprinting guides them back to that spot when it is time to spawn. For most chinook, that's three to four years.

Workers wearing waders scoop them into nets, about 20 pounds at a time, weigh them and transfer them to tanks. The delicate young fish, along with the water around them, are sucked upward through clear plastic vacuum tubes, which deposit them into temperature-controlled trucks colorfully painted with the slogan “Fish for the future.” They’ll be placed in net pens in the lakes for several weeks to acclimate, then released.

The Wolf Lake Hatchery put about 230,000 chinook into Lake Michigan from late March through May this year, down about half from previous years. There is no point in putting in more, as they likely wouldn’t survive on available food. Other hatcheries in Michigan and other states have made similar cuts. Overall, Michigan hatcheries stocked 25 million fish at more than 1,100 locations, including seven species of salmon and trout.

Salmon are reproducing naturally in the wild, something that was uncertain in the beginning of the experiment. Hatchery-raised fish have a fin near their tail clipped to differentiate them from those hatched in the wild. Almost all salmon caught last year in Lake Superior were wild; about 75 percent of those caught in Lake Michigan were wild.

“Some people argue pretty convincingly that the numbers of chinook were so high for so long that they kind of ate themselves out of house and home,” O’Keefe said.

But there’s more to it.

Any introduced species tends to boom at first, then decline and level off, experts say. And the lakes are in a constant state of balancing and re-balancing among the creatures that live in them.

In this case the salmon – the top predator fish – has partly been taken down by an invasive mussel that is no larger than a pinky fingernail.

Quagga mussels carpet parts of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, packed as tightly as 10,000 per square meter.

“They are filtering out all the good nutrients and algae out of the water and storing them on the bottom of the lake,” said Jay Wesley, DNR fisheries manager for the Lake Michigan basin. “So the species that are doing well now are bottom-oriented species, where all the energy is.”

That means less food for alewives and, therefore, fewer alewives.

“They’re kind of getting pinched from both sides,” O’Keefe said.

The mussels themselves have a predator, a small bottom-dwelling fish called the round goby. It was accidentally introduced from Asia in ship ballast water and has spread through the lakes since being discovered in Lake St. Clair in 1990.

Tanner says it’s difficult to measure the goby population, but there may be as many of them now as there once were alewives.

“It’s really almost an ideal food source,” Tanner said. “They spawn three times a summer. There are lots of round gobies from tiny to eight or nine inches in size. Lake trout are doing very well, brown trout are doing very well, coho are doing very well. So are northern pike and muskellunge."

But the chinook is different. It swims in higher waters, moving great distances, looking for silver flashes to snap up. Single-minded, like an aquatic version of the Terminator, it won’t go to the bottom to seek food. It will just swim farther.

That means two things when the food supply is down: Fewer chinook survive, and fewer grow to prize-winning sizes.

“They’re not the smartest fish in the world. They didn’t adapt, like the lake trout,” said Janice Deaton, who has been running Lake Huron fishing trips aboard the boat J-Lyn since 1990 from the Thumb community of Harbor Beach.

'They were starving'

Janice Deaton and her husband, Ken Deaton, have been fishing in Lake Huron since the 1970s.

“There were lots and lots of salmon, business was very good,” Janice Deaton recalled.

And the kings were big.

“In the late '70s, it was nothing to catch a 25-pound, 30-pound salmon all the time, and lots of them,” she said.

That was dramatically different by the early 2000s, after the quagga mussel was firmly established and competing with the alewife for food.

They started reeling in chinook that didn’t look healthy, with large heads and thin bodies.

“They’d have the head of a 15-pounder and maybe weigh 6 or 7 pounds,” she said. “You could tell they were starving to death. In the springtime, you could see these skinny little things lying on the bottom.”

Within just a few years of the crash, only half of the charter operators on Lake Huron were still in business. But O’Keefe said there could be more to the failed businesses than a shortage of salmon. The auto industry already was in recession by the time of the crash, limiting auto workers' spending money. At the same time, gas prices were nearing all-time highs and Michigan was seeing an overall decline in both hunting and fishing.

“Certain areas where the walleye do well, such as Saginaw Bay, actually saw increased charter fishing,” O’Keefe said. “It wasn’t enough to offset the loss from chinook.”

When the Deatons take clients out on Lake Huron, “We specifically tell them, ‘You're going to get mainly lake trout and steelhead with a few salmon, some cohos and some kings, mixed in,” Janice Deaton said. Steelhead are a type of trout.

So far in Lake Michigan, although the number of chinook caught per charter trip was down in 2015, the number of overall charter trips is up, according to O’Keefe’s research.

Daggett, 40, a charter captain for 19 years, said he’s mostly booked for morning trips during the busiest months of June and July.

He is working to adapt fishing trips to make the most of available fish.

“The next couple of years is definitely going to be interesting,” he said. “The king population is down, but we have good steelhead populations, good lake trout populations. We’re fishing different now than we were five years ago.”

Jay Wesley, the DNR's Lake Michigan basin fisheries coordinator, said changes are still coming fast, which makes the future hard to predict. In Lake Huron, there's discussion about expanding the stocks of Atlantic salmon, a few of which are placed each year in the St. Marys River near Sault Ste. Marie.

There's also an effort to boost all predator species to try to match available prey to predators throughout the Great Lakes food chain, diversifying available sport fish.

"That is going to be our challenge in the near future," he said.

But right now?

"There are still chinook out there."

Contact Kathleen Lavey at (517) 377-1251 or klavey@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @kathleenlavey

Salmon in the Great Lakes

1966: More than 659,000 coho salmon reared in two Michigan hatcheries from eggs procured in Oregon are planted in Lake Michigan

1967: More than 800,000 chinook salmon – also known as king salmon – are planted in Lake Michigan and Lake Superior

1968: Chinook and coho salmon are released in Lake Huron

1970s: Sportfishing booms, eventually building to a $4 billion industry

1980s: Bacterial kidney disease is an early indicator that salmon populations in the lakes may be toto high

1990s: The quagga mussel is discovered in Lake Huron

1990s: Salmon catches in Lake Huron dwindle

2003: Competing with mussels for food, the alewife population collapses in Lake Huron; the salmon population follows soon after

2012: Salmon catches in Lake Michigan spike

2014: Michigan and Ontario stop stocking chinook in the southern portion of Lake Huron because the alewife population won't support them

By the numbers

950 kilotons: Weight of alewives in Lake Michigan in the early 1960s

25 million: Fish stocked in the Great Lakes and other Michigan lakes in 2015

7: Species of trout and salmon stocked during 2015