Hot Spring Coho Salmon Fishing on Lake Michigan

I'm up in Northern Illinois this Memorial Day weekend with not a lot of good Crappie fishing areas around here, and this great big ole Lake Michigan just a couple miles from the house. Plus, I got a Charter Boat Captain buddy of mine telling me he's catching limits in a couple hours. So naturally what do I have to do. GO FISHING.



My buddy Ronnie runs the Bonshell (http://bonshellfishing.com/). I originally created that website for him back in the late 1990's. Since then Ronnie continues to maintain it himself, and I've been fishing with him ever since. He is based out of Waukegan Harbor, just North of Chicago.

Check out all that gear. Planer Boards, Downriggers, Dodgers and Flashers, Dipsey Divers (a new kind). Look at all those colors and gear you drag behind you at about 2.7 MPH.The funny thing is, you drag all that stuff behind you, and all the fish hits is a small fly! The gear is to get the lines away from the boat, to the side and/or down. The Flashers and Dodgers act as an attractor, and to give the fly action.


Speaking of the late 1990's, here's Adam. We worked together making Grainger's computer systems Y2K compliant back in that same time frame. Ask him about something called an E10K and you'll see the veins on his forehead get bigger!

The fish were shallow, in only 20-30 feet of water (shallow for Lake Michigan). When we left Waukegan Harbor we went South. We were actually fishing right off the shoreline of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center for those of you that remember your basic training days there (Jimfish, "G").


Anyway, the fishing was real hot. I think we caught our first fish after we had only two rods in the water. And we caught three more after we had already hit our limit (about three hours later) and before we could get all the rods out of the water. Now I know why you should never plan to actually catch the captains limit. His limit is the boats buffer for exactly this reason.



On top of it, we lost a lot of fish. I lost three fish in a row at one point.


Debbie and Ronnie with a nice Coho Salmon. It was a strange year. The Coho we usually catch this time of the year are smaller. This year they are quite large. Great eating size.


Everyone brought home plenty of fish that day. It certainly was action packed. 28 fish in less than three hours.


The fish are cleaned and bagged right there on the boat.



Nice pink meat. Don't get any fresher that this and that's for sure. Oh, unless you eat it like Sushi right there on the boat. Ronnie tells me that it's happened before where his clients have done exactly that. They get clients from all over the world.


I baked the Salmon Filets at 300 degrees for maybe 20 minutes at most using nothing buy Tony Chachere's "More Spice" seasoning. I sprinkle it on heavy, I love this stuff. I go through it like it's going out of style. The regular Tony Chachere's seasoning is good, but the "More Spice" stuff is the best IMHO. I've led a sheltered life, I can still remember when I first heard of Tony Chechere's seasoning. I found some in Rip A Lip's camper. He brought his camper for Billbob and I to use at Sardis and I found some in his cabinet. Here's that old story: http://www.crappie.com/crappie/conte...arkabutla.html Boy that seems like it was so long ago.

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