The Outdoors: Coho Madness

Just about every able-bodied sportfisherman in the Midwest was driving, flying or hitchhiking to Lake Michigan. Boats were passing under the Manistee River bridge at the rate of 13 a min ute. Anything that would float was in the water, from rowboats, canoes and sailboats on up to a 50-ft. deep-sea fish ing boat, Mitchell, up from the Ba hamas. Said Fisherman Bob Hurtel: “If there was one boat out there, there were 5,000. You could almost walk across the water on them.”

The reason for the frenzy was the presence in the lake of a game fish whose natural home is in the coastal waters and streams of the Pacific. Coho salmon were being caught in fresh-water Lake Michigan by the thousands. And every strike was a battle. The silvery coho salmon are 2 ft. long, weigh 15 Ibs. and more. “They’re all different,” said Ron Jenkins of Battle Creek, Mich., who had caught three in his first half-hour. “Some will jump; some will go deep. They’ll all fight.” Said a farmer who had been trying to charter a boat for three months: “I come from muskie country. This is the nearest thing to deep-sea fishing I’ll ever see.”

Plague of Alewives. For Middle Westerners who have watched game fish in the Great Lakes virtually disappear, the arrival of the cohos is the best news imaginable. Gone is the plentiful supply of lake trout, burbot, walleyes and pike that once made the lakes a fisherman’s paradise. The fierce sea lamprey which invaded the lakes from the Atlantic by way of the Welland Canal, gradually wiped out the game fish. The lampreys were eventually controlled by chemicals, but in their wake came a 6-in. saltwater trash fish, the alewife (TIME, July 7, 1967), which monopolized the lakes. Four years ago, the Michigan Department of Conservation tried a bold gambit: it transported coho roe from the Pacific coast in the hope that the fingerlings would adapt to fresh water and feed on the plague of alewives.

The experiment has succeeded beyond the conservationists’ highest hopes. Last year, when the first batch had matured, fishermen caught 33,000 cohos; this year the catch will approach 100,000. For the little puddle-bass fisherman, the advent of Pacific Coast salmon has brought a whole new world. Detroit’s J. L. Hudson Co. estimates it will do $200,000 in new business this year selling salmon-fishing equipment. And in Manistee, Mich., where the cohos are running this week on their annual spawning run, the town’s 16 hotels and motels are booked solid, and a city ordinance had to be passed to keep trailers and trucks off the streets at night. Charter boats are charging $25 for half a day. This year the local bait shop, Fishermen’s Center, which sold $1,300 worth of lures on one recent Saturday, is open 24 hours a day.

Frenzied as the present season is, next year promises to be even wilder. The-state of Michigan, encouraged by its success with cohos, stocked its streams with 800,000 Chinook, or king, salmon fingerlings last year. Next fall the Chinooks, which weigh up to 60 Ibs., will start running. Fishermen can hardly wait.