While trolling 5 miles from the shore of Lake Michigan on Saturday, Capt. Kyle Nied watched one of his clients hook a big salmon on a downrigger. Nied and his party of four anglers had left the dock in Waukegan, Illinois, around noon on his charter, Spendthrift. They’d already had a banner day of salmon fishing when the big coho bit around 7:30 p.m.
“The fish hit a fly off a dodger in 57 feet of water,” Kyle’s brother Nick Nied, who’s also a local charter captain, tells Outdoor Life. Kyle was on the water and unavailable for comment when contacted by OL, but Nick fishes with his brother often, and he knows all about the near-record coho that one of Kyle’s clients, a woman who asked not to be named, caught on July 13. He says the fish weighed 18.4 pounds.
“It was a big one, and when she got it close to the boat, Kyle thought it was a nice king salmon,” Nick says. “But when he netted it, he saw it was a massive coho, which are usually much smaller than kings. It’s the biggest coho we’ve ever seen, and it was just shy of the Illinois record coho caught in 1972.”
Pulled from Lake Michigan in May of that year, the record coho weighed 20 pounds 9 ounces. And although it’s been on the books for more than 50 years now, Nick says it’s about time for that state record to fall. Judging from how good the action has been so far this summer, he expects that to happen any month now.
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Nick, 38, and Kyle have caught their share of Great Lakes salmon, too. The two brothers have been fishing Lake Michigan all their lives, and they run the Waukegan-based charter service along with their father, Jerry, who’s been chasing salmon there for 48 years now. The Nieds have seen the lake go through plenty of cycles, and Nick says that so far this summer, they’ve been catching more and bigger fish than in years past.
“This is the best big salmon fishing we’ve ever seen on Lake Michigan,” Nick says. “I think the state-record coho salmon will be caught this year, and perhaps a new Chinook [king] salmon record too.”
He attributes this to the abundant baitfish populations currently in the lake, which, along with ideal weather conditions, have allowed the salmon to fatten up quickly.
“I think it’s because there are so many alewife baitfish schools. We also had a mild winter, with good clear water and not much wind,” Nick explains. “It’s the big schools of alewives that are the key to this fishing.”
He says they’ve been targeting these schools in 50 to 70 feet of water and trolling four-inch-long Howie streamers, which look just like alewives. White flies have been the ticket on most days, Nick says, but they’ll occasionally use different colors to get a bite. They also incorporate dodgers into their trolling rigs, which attract fish by vibrating. The key is keeping these rigs near the bottom where the salmon are feeding.
Timing is also critical when targeting Great Lakes salmon because the fish migrate. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources stocks coho and Chinook salmon in Waukegan harbor every spring, Nick explains, and when those fish reach three years of age, they return to the area in what he calls a “false spawn.” (Unlike their ocean-dwelling relatives, hatchery salmon have a hard time spawning successfully in the wild.)
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That run takes place in the late summer and early fall, and it’s during this time that the biggest salmon of the year are typically caught on Lake Michigan. The Illinois king salmon record, which was also set in the 1970s, was landed in August. It weighed 37 pounds.
“I really think a record will be broken by August or September,” Nick says. “Everything is lining up perfectly for both coho and kind records to fall. The alewives are here, the water is looking good, and we’ve honed our trolling tactics to catch ‘em.”