Description

By: Philip McM. Pittman with Larry L. Simonsen

The king salmon is an extremely exciting fish to catch. In the upper Great Lakes it is commonly caught from charter boats with professional skipper-guides and relatively heavy tackle. That spoils the real fun. The Lake Michigan ports have been overburdened by this tactic as surely as they have been by the sport of fishing mentality that induces four states to dump annually over eighteen million salmon in that lake for the put-and- take pleasure of its anglers. The fish have naturally migrated, over foraged their target feed species, gone deep, stunted, and so become harder and less fun to catch. In northern Lake Huron on the other hand, king salmon plants have remained reasonable, forage species are plentiful, and the sport fish stocks are thriving. North Shore Chinook tells the story of an entirely distant small boat, light tackle, shallow water sport fishery that could be the model for other Lake Huron ports. As opposed to deep water school fishing, the northern Lake Huron fishery calls for exploring sometimes remarkably shallow bottom structures with what may seem exceedingly light tackle- most often one angler versus one fish (sometimes ore than one), thirty pounds of fish on ten pound test line or less. It is a good story about what may be one of the most exciting and distinctive sport fisheries in the world and the only book to address the particular pleasures and problems of this kind of fishing.