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My take from this is we will be seeing a weaker summer steelhead fishery near Portage/MC in the future?

Gosh I hope not. After early June/mid june that is all I have to look forward to out of Portage pretty much. End of July and aug is baren besides lakers and occasional silver fish.

Start wrote:

My take from this is we will be seeing a weaker summer steelhead fishery near Portage/MC in the future?

Steelhead fishing out of Michigan City should stay strong. Trail creek is Indiana's egg collection site. They will always protect the collection site. Indiana was the very first state to have these great fish. Started stocking back in the 70's. We only stocked Portage and Michigan City. Aproxx 200,000 per port. All sports writers were putting up articles about the fantastic Steel head fishing. Best in the entire country. Better then the pacific northwest coast where those fish originated from. Around 1990 or shortly after that Indiana took over the Bodine hatchery. Steel head now had a 3rd port to fill. Portages numbers over the years have been taken down and some of those fish have been moved to the St. Joe at the expense of watering down Portage. My boat was part of a 10 boat group that gave up there boat to take out sportswriters, tackle reps and DNR from other states to show off our fishery. A few hours on the lake for the group was all that was needed to put up 84 steelies. We produced a 18# steelie for the asst. director to Illinois DNR. That fish went up on his wall and Illinois started to stock these great fish also.
The pictures are from our outing. I had Stren and Rapala reps along with the Illinois asst. director. The gentleman in the red shirt is Bill Cullerton. Bill was a WW2 fighter ace and had the out door radio station out of the Chicago area. The fella to his left was the illinois asst. director at the time.

 

That's pretty cool Ed!

Ed - What is the source of this?  Very interesting.  Data I think we all want to see.

Jeff are you referring to the graphs,,, if so it is all DNR information I used. The line time graph can be deceiving. Some changes over time for some of the species. In the early years all fish stocked at a small fingerling size. Later years Steel and Coho being raised to larger sizes. 

Is there a pie chart similar to the one on the other post showing where these steelhead were stocked each year from 2012-2020? I understand that MC will always have some sort of a steelhead run, but it seems just from looking at this data that moving down from 700,000+ stocked in 2016 to 200,000 stocked in 2020 will have to affect the fishery somehow. That's a staggering decrease, unless there are new stocking methods that would allow these newly stocked fish to have a comparable adult population in 4-5 years to the current adult population that ran last year and will be running this year.

Start wrote:

Is there a pie chart similar to the one on the other post showing where these steelhead were stocked each year from 2012-2020? I understand that MC will always have some sort of a steelhead run, but it seems just from looking at this data that moving down from 700,000+ stocked in 2016 to 200,000 stocked in 2020 will have to affect the fishery somehow. That's a staggering decrease, unless there are new stocking methods that would allow these newly stocked fish to have a comparable adult population in 4-5 years to the current adult population that ran last year and will be running this year.

I'll make an attempt to answer you first question, no I do not believe there are any pie chart graphs done that way for the time period your talking about. Your second item of interest,,,, when looking at the graph over time it can be deceiving. Those high numbers you mentioned could reflect before Indiana moved to raise steel and coho to a larger size,,, and then when they finally did fish numbers got reduced primarily so those fish can be raised to a larger size needing much more hatchery space. The only fish they cannot do that with is kings.

I appreciate the insight, thank you. Really looking forward to the run this year.