Lake Michigan – Milwaukee 8/18

Decided to make a trip down to Milwaukee and chase some salmon today as the weather forecast finally looked promising, which hasn’t been the case the last few times I’ve gone. Or maybe I should say the weather looked like it would actually match the forecast for once. I was joined by IDOer Whiskerkev and our friend Tom. The one bad thing about a 2:00 departure for Milwaukee is the dodging of the drunks, but I only ran across two this trip. We hooked up with Joel Ballweg at the ramp and both departed the launch at around 4:30 and headed to the same area to start setting gear. Being that it was dark out, I quickly lost sight of Joel as I was setting gear. We started in around 75 feet of water. I got the riggers and wireline dipsey rods deployed and moved on to setting board rods as it was starting to get light in the east. I was just getting a 4 color set, and as it was swinging out into position, before I even got it in the holder, it headed the other direction with the first hookup of the day. After a short fight, and nice 3 year old king found its way into the bottom of the net. The next fish hit on a wire dipsey rod but came unbuttoned shortly after hooking up. That was followed shortly by a hit on the other wire rod and resulted in a small lake trout destined for Tom’s smoker.
The sun was now up above the horizon and we weren’t marking a whole lot of bait so we decided to start sliding toward deeper water, which proved to not be a very wise move, but at the time, who would have known. We worked our way out to 120 feet of water and saw basically nothing on the locator. We had one drive by on a wire rod and that was it. So we swung west and started heading back toward a little shallower water where we had been marking fish and bait earlier. As we were sliding past the 100 foot mark, the full color rod started screaming and the planer board vanished under water, which is usually the sign of a solid fish. As I pulled the rod out of the holder, the wire rod on the opposite side hooked up. Whiskerkev grabbed that rod and within seconds, the 3 color rod started clicking and a nice rainbow was out of the water before Tom could even get it out of the holder. We went from nothing for well over an hour to three fished hooked up in 30 seconds.

My fish was still screaming in the other direction and didn’t stop until it had pulled well over 100 feet of line. As we were all fighting fish, we realized we had nobody to handle net duty. We managed to get the board off Tom’s fish, and when it got close, I handed the rod to Kevin and quick got Tom’s fish in the net. I grabbed the rod back from Kevin and realized we had a problem as the lines had tangled. We now had a wire line tangled with a leadcore, which usually results in the wire cutting off the other one. Luckily though, it was tangled between the flasher and the fly. We eventually got Kevin’s fish in the boat, and a quick cut of the leader and I was free to fight my fish again. After a lengthy battle, my biggest lake Michigan king yet found the bottom of the net. We somehow completed the triple even with a tangle, and had a rainbow, and laker, and a big king that tipped the scales at 23.6 pounds.

We got gear re-set and hadn’t travelled too far when a rigger rod went and Kevin was back up on a really solid fish. We were hoping for another solid king but ended up with a seriously fat lake trout that got a photo op and was sent back. Things slowed down quite a bit after that. We managed a small rainbow and then had nothing for quite some time, but continued to work the same area for the few decent scattered marks we were seeing.

Finally, the secret weapon rig downrigger fired and Kevin was back up. As he was just getting into the battle, the wire dipsey rod on the same side fired and we were into a double. Kevin and Tom were both into solid battles that lasted a while and eventually produced two nice 4 year old kings that ended up being our final fish of the day. We fished for a couple more hours and just ended up washing baits and eventually pulled gear at noon. All in all a solid morning of fishing as we ended up going 9 for 11 and had a heavy cooler of fish to clean.
Results for the day:
3 color – magnum Crab face 1/1
4 color – magnum RV Agent Orange 2/2
Full core – Magnum Black Ice 1/1
Wire dipsey – Green Flasher / Double Aqua fly 3/5
Wire dipsey – white flasher / LBB Fly 0/0
Rigger – Green flasher / double Aqua fly 1/1
Rigger – SWR white flasher / LBB fly 1/1
Too many other combos to list 0/0