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Decided to make the run east to NB from Portage and found some active fish between 80'-95'.  Ran 4 riggers and 2 boards (2-Man crew) and all hit but the 275' and 300' steel were the best.  Ended up with 5 kings between 12-19lbs, 2 steelhead, 1 coho, and laker.  Released relatively small steelhead and the laker.

Awesome!! Great job guys. Is it deja vu to last summer? About the same time too I think.

Yep, that profile pick was just about year ago and this one was almost identical!

Curiosity has me asking why are they showing up there 2 years in a row. I don't think they are stocking in NB, but they are in MC, Portage, EC and St Joe.

Way to go Geoff

Thanks for reporting. Great job!

St.Joe I believe stocks them too so I would assume it’s fish stocked from both.

Tmik34 wrote:

Curiosity has me asking why are they showing up there 2 years in a row. I don't think they are stocking in NB, but they are in MC, Portage, EC and St Joe.

Glad you brought this up, Tim! We can't know for certain, but it's probably a combination of food/temp/currents. 

I can say for certain that it's almost completely unrelated to stocking location at this time of year. For the most part, we don't even begin to see staging until mid to late August. 

I can't emphasize enough that the fish you are catching from March until mid-August on the south end have essentially zero to do with southend stockings. In fact, Indiana could not stock chinooks at ALL and you would never even notice a change in the spring and summer boat fishery - only about 2-3% of the kings caught out of our ports from March-August are of Indiana stocking origin. You'd only notice a change for mid-August to September. 

The below snapshot from a Mass Marking Program presentation shows an example of chinooks recovered in the same district as they were stocked, by month. You can see that essentially during spring and summer, few chinooks are recovered near their stocking location. They're all mixed up, roaming around the lake. The proportion recovered in their stocking district starts creeping up in August, but really doesn't substantially change until September



 


Here's another very similar example. These pie charts show the stocking origin of chinooks landed in Grand Haven and Muskegon. Note that the pie charts for April-July and August are almost identical, especially the light blue slice, which represents chinooks stocked in Grand Haven and Muskegon and also recovered there. 

And then once you hit September and October it's suddenly almost all fish stocked at that location
 

Great information Ben thanks! I have a question. If bait was to was to shrink to the point were Indiana was say 2014-2017 time frame, would the kings we see in the spring time be less then we see when bait is up? Or would it stay the same? 

Several years ago, I think in the late 90s I caught a tagged fish Out of east Chicago I called the number on the tag and it had been caught and tagged up by the Mackinac Bridge by researchers the next day they drove down from Mackinac and paid me $100 to retrieve the microchip inside the fish.