Lake Michigan salmon report Two Rivers, WI 7-30-07

What another great long weekend on Lake Michigan. I am absolutly hooked on fishing the “real” pond. My wife and I left Thursday afternoon and were not abld to fish that evening as we had planned due to lightning in the area. Friday morning we awoke to no wind, but plenty of fog. 50-100′ was tops for visibility. We decided to go out anyway. We stayed close heading straight out the pier heads to 45′. We only saw one other boat, thankfully, but did hear a fog horn going off on a very large vessel. We decided to troll away from the sound until we could tell it was getting further away. Later that day we found out from another boat staying the same place we did that the big boat was so close to them, it almost hit a planer board! And it wasn’t until this close call that he was using his fog horn. We didn’t fish long as there were still some pretty good rollers that didn’t agree with Beck. I think it more that with the fog she couldn’t see shore.

The rest of the weekend we caught fish consistantly during the sunrise/sunset times. A perfect example would be Monday morning. We put in at 3:30am and were fishing by 4am. As soon as we came off plane we marked fish nonstop 20′ down. I didn’t have a chance to set all six lines before a king hit and screamed 100′ of ling like nothing. That fish came off, along with the next 2, but we did manage to boat our 10 fish limit by 7:30, losing 6 as well. We had a nice mix of Coho’s, Kings, and Rainbows.

Our typical day we keeyed on 50′ early and gradually moved out to deeper water as the sun rose. White dodger and By Blue flies were our best baits early, with green and glow spoons taking over as the sun rose. We fished downriggers about halfway down and on the bottom. We also ran pumphandles, basically a beefed up 3way rig with a 1lb ball, on the bottom. Our dipsy rods were ran on #3 settings and caught a lot of fish early with only 3 passes of line out. Midday 7 passes was better. The most exciting were the flat lines with spoons ran 150′ behind an OffShore planer board for the rainbows. You would know when you had a fish because it would be jumping clear out of the water before the board moved.

I can’t stress enough how much fun this is. It is fairly easly to rig your own boat if you want or there are numerous charters in the area that will show you a great time.