Chinook Salmon Fishing on Lake Huron

The lake that lost its alewives

For thirty years Lake Huron ran the same play Lake Michigan did: stock chinook, let them eat alewives, sell charter trips. Then in 2003 the alewife population essentially disappeared from the main basin. The reasons are still argued — several severe winters, predation pressure from a very large salmon population, and the bottom of the food web reorganized by zebra and quagga mussels — but the outcome is not in dispute. Chinook, which are close to obligate alewife eaters in this system, lost their food and their condition, and the fishery went from world-class to marginal in about two seasons.

What came after is genuinely interesting. Walleye exploded in Saginaw Bay and spread across the main basin. Lake trout, which had never fully recovered from sea lamprey, began reproducing naturally at a scale nobody expected. Huron turned back into something closer to the lake it was before 1966.

What is left, and where

Chinook did not vanish. Michigan and Ontario tributaries still produce wild smolts, and those fish are the backbone of the modern Huron king fishery. They concentrate in the northern third of the lake, where colder water, current through De Tour Passage, and smelt and bloater populations give them something to eat. Rogers City is the center of it. From there north to Hammond Bay and De Tour, a July morning can still put two or three kings in the boat.

These are not Ontario fish. A Huron king running 12 to 16 pounds is a good one, and they tend to be long and lean rather than deep and thick. They also fight differently — a lean fish makes faster, longer runs.

Adjusting the program

Because the forage is goby, smelt and bloater rather than alewife, spoons outfish flasher-fly rigs here more often than they do on Michigan or Ontario. Run faster than you would on a staging Lake Michigan fish — 2.4 to 2.8 mph — and size down. Huron is also shallower on average than Michigan, at 195 feet, so the thermocline compresses into a narrower band and the whole cold-water community stacks in it. You will catch lake trout and steelhead in the same spread. That is not a failure of the program; it is what the lake is now.

Saginaw Bay is a different lake

Do not go to Saginaw Bay looking for kings. It is warm, shallow, turbid and one of the great walleye factories in North America. The kings are north, on the clean rock shoreline from Alpena up.

What Huron teaches you about the whole chain

If you fish Lake Michigan or Ontario, the Huron story is worth understanding because it is the risk case for both. Both of those lakes are running on alewife populations that are thinner than they were, and both stocking programs have been cut in response. Huron is what the bottom of that curve looks like — and also what the recovery looks like, since the native lake trout and walleye that replaced the salmon are doing better now than at any point since the lamprey era.

Boats and weather

Huron has more shoreline than any Great Lake — 3,827 miles — and most of it is quiet, with long stretches between working harbors on the northern shore. If you are running from Rogers City to Hammond Bay you may be a long way from help. Carry a VHF, watch the northwest wind, and remember that Thunder Bay’s shipwreck field exists because this lake gets ugly with very little notice.