ACROSS THE STATE LINE
Chinook exchange with Indiana’s Lake Michigan fisheries biologist enlightening
Here’s another piece of the fall Chinook story on southern Lake Michigan, an email Q&A — posted unabridged online — with Brian Breidert, Indiana’s Lake Michigan fisheries biologist. Are you satisfied?
We are very displeased with the fall fishery in Indiana over the past few years. Chinooks are highly desired by anglers and are the easiest and cheapest to raise in the hatchery. If there was anything we could do to move the needle significantly on the fall fishery without torpedoing our other stocking programs, we would do it in a heartbeat.
The single biggest predictor of good baby Chinook survival is the strength of the alewife spawn in the year that the Chinooks are stocked, and we have had several very poor years for alewife spawning, especially in 2013 and 2014. Until we have more baitfish and reliable alewife spawns, we will likely not see an increase in Chinook survival rates and improve our fishery.
Is the fall return what you expected? It is important to note that the poor fall Chinook fishing of the past several years is NOT from the most recent stocking cuts. Chinooks return in the fall as mature 2- and 3-year-old fish, for the most part. This year’s fishery is built on the backs of fish stocked in 2015 and 2016 — before the stocking cut in Indiana took place.
Any changes coming in stocking rates or stocking placements?
We are planning on stocking between 70,000 and 75,000 Chinooks next year. We eliminated some fingerling skamania and will be making those up with a few extra Chinooks.
Chinooks will continue to be stocked in Trail Creek (odd years) and the Little Calumet River (even years). We went to this rotating stocking strategy because we did not feel that spreading 70,000 Chinooks over our three historical stocking locations would provide a viable fishery at any location, given current low return rates. Trail Creek and Little Calumet River have the best return, so that is where we are going to stock our fish.
Are you getting pushback from fishermen either way?
There has been a lot of angst about the fact that Indiana dropped from 200,000 Chinooks down to 63,000 last year. Many anglers have seen these new numbers and believe that Indiana is getting the short end of the stick and stocks disproportionately fewer Chinooks than other states. In reality, the opposite is true. Indiana has only 1 percent of the surface area of Lake Michigan and about 2.6 percent of Lake Michigan’s shoreline length. Despite this very small footprint, Indiana in 2017 stocked 4.75 percent of all the kings in Lake Michigan.
Steelhead and coho have provided fantastic fishing over the past several years in Indiana — for boat, pier and stream anglers alike. They are the best returning fish on our end of the lake right now. We feel it is irresponsible to eliminate our best-performing fisheries at the expense of our worst-performing fishery. We wish we did not have to choose, but it is an unfortunate reality.
Deer
Illinois bowhunters harvested 7,352 deer through Sunday, compared with 7,069 for the same period in 2017.
Chicago Fishes
The second Chicago Fishes event is 3 to 6 p.m. Friday on the Riverwalk between Franklin and Lake streets. The inaugural event was notable for Richie Garcia ,5, catching a rare American eel.
Stray cast
The Bears are rock bass.