Girl Power Wanted: the annual Powder Puff Derby is set for Saturday, July
25, with registration set for 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. at the 700 Dock Pavilion in
Washington Park.
Complete rules at
www.hoosiercohoclub.org.
Basics are $20 per female with 100% paid back for the 10 biggest
individual salmon or trout. Food and plenty of additional prizes
provided. There is also an optional boat category ($50 entry, weigh best
five).
For more information, contact Laurie at info@fishingoncloudnine or stop
by slip 704.
Reminder; no membership meetings during July or August. Meetings return
Sept. 9 with Smoked Salmon Smackdown III.
Salmon Slam is Sept.12 with rules basically same as last couple years;
$100 per boat entry, $1,200 first place (30 entries), weigh five
salmon/trout.
Big thanks to captain's Dave Burke, Ricky Pawlicke and Steve Kreighbaum
for taking Smolts Division youth fishing for the June 24 charter trip (N-D
story below). Also Mike Kail for being on standby. And Bill Wiesemann,
Tyler Kreighbaum and Jerry Ross for taking Smolts on earlier trips.
And how about those lake trout? While salmon fishing has been less than
mediocre, at least four lakers weighing over 26 pounds (certified scales)
have been caught early this summer by Hoosier Coho Club captains. A story
mentioning those "T-Rex Trout" is also below.
From the 6-26-15 News-Dispath; "Smolts having some fun"
From setting lines to docking the boats, teenagers did it all on
Wednesday.
A Hoosier Coho Club Smolts outing was not your ordinary charter boat trip.
They're here to learn aren't they," captain Steve Kreighbaum quipped as
youth boarded his boat, adding "we'll put them to work."
Next thing I saw was Ameer Hoskins behind the wheel piloting Kreighbaum's
Crorkindill out to the lake. Six hours later, Rishi Verma deftly backed
the 32-foot Marinette into its' slip.
In between, the Smolts received hands on experience with compass headings,
GPS coordinates and trolling speed. They set downriggers and wire-line
diver rods, netted each other's salmon and trout and ended up, under close
supervision, fileting their own fish.
They learned from some of the best. Combined, captains Kreighbaum, Ricky
Pawlicke and Dave Burke have over a century of Lake Michigan fishing
experience.
Smolts are the youth division of the Hoosier Coho Club. Smolt membership
is free to anyone age 13-18 provided they complete the membership form
(guardian signature required) at
www.hoosiercohoclub.org. This was,
however, the last scheduled outing of the season.
Many of the youth had previously fished on Lake Michigan aboard Bill
Wiesemann's Cloud Nine in the Pro/Am and Classic fishing tournaments this
spring, which was specifically for the Michigan City High School Fishing
Club led by teacher Mark Marz.
"They've all been great kids," Burke said. "Every time I've been out they
ask questions and want to learn."
Pawlicke was relieved they all caught fish.
"I was worried all night we wouldn't get into enough fish," Pawlicke said,
which says a lot about the way fishing has been in recent weeks.
Fortunately, fishing was good enough that each teenager caught two or
three fish - either lake trout or coho.
Newest Smolt member, 13-year old Jayden Fogus, whipped the three largest
aboard the Tight Line, including a 12.48-pound laker.
"The big one was on a dodger on a wire diver in 107 feet of water," Fogus
recalled like a seasoned angler. I didn't get the story, but there is a
photo of big sister Alexis Jackson hoisting a net over the stern which
appears to be sagging with the biggest trout of the day.
By all accounts — captains and youth — this was a welcome learning
experience.
The spin is if the youngsters have fun with the fishing, some will stick
with it, learn all they can about the fish and the lake and the whole
ecosystem and care enough to protect it into the future.
From the 7-2-15 News-Dispatch (edited); "That's no dinosaur, its a trout"
A Lake Michigan Leviathan, a dinosaur from the deep and likely the largest
fish you'll hear caught on the big lake in 2015.
Ian Stewart, former Michigan City charter captain, currently fishing out
of Chicago, steered client Chad Conover to a 31.6-pound lake trout on June
29.
"Biggest I've ever seen," the Kingfisher skipper said. "Maybe without
salmon we can pump the world class trout fishery."
Indeed, there are some incredible trout out there. While salmon and
steelhead continue to shrink in size, long-lived lakers are reopening a
lot of eyes.
Besides Stewart's beast, Jerry Link of Originator Charters in St. Joseph,
Mich., boated a 26.2-pounder the same weekend, Michigan City's Gary
Huffman (Holly Lynn) caught a 27-9 in late May and just last Sunday (July
12), captain Craig Koepke piloted Sylvia Goodhart to a 28.6 aboard Boatre
Dame out of Michigan City.
The typical mature Chinook this season will be about half those weights,
steelhead maybe one-third.
While all lake trout are quite handsome, big-headed males, the ones
weighing in the high-teens and beyond, take on a menacing countenance.
Viewed head-on with mouth agape, they look lizard-like in a T-Rex sort of
way.
"It came on a Dreamweaver Super Slim, mixed vegetable (color pattern),
pinned five feet above a dodger/fly on bottom in 107 feet of water,"
Stewart said.
Stewart also mentioned a blue dolphin pattern Dreamweaver has been good
and the spoons are taking 40 percent of the lakers on some days.
"Overall, my best laker rig is a plain silver flasher with a small green
spinny." Stewart said, "white and green flies have been good lately and an
all-green Spin Doctor and green fly has been solid with the spoon pinned
above it."
Stewart advised speed has been critical at times.
"Its not always dead slow (troll speed), some days we're moving up to 2.3
to 2.4 knots."
Most anglers around here have a love/hate relationship with lake trout
compared to the straight hate attitude farther north.
Local trollers would love for salmon to be biting all the time, but are
glad the big trout are out there when silver-fish catches wane. Typically
weighing six to 12 pounds, it is often easy for Michigan City boats to put
100 pounds of trout in the cooler, even if they are sluggish fighters,
sloppier to clean and relatively inefficient consumers of bait fish.
Up north, lakers are not easily targeted and are seen as a villain in the
predator/prey balance harming the salmon population.
Biologists figure the large lake trout average about one year of age for
each pound of weight. That means Stewart's trophy trout was born sometime
in the mid 1980s.
