Where's the Salmon?

Grand River anglers: Where's the salmon run?

by Howard Meyerson | The Grand Rapids Press Friday October 17, 2008

When Jeromy Butts, of Belmont, showed up at the Sixth Street fish ladder at lunch hour last week, hoping to show his daughter Syndey the big salmon that run up river in the fall, they saw one fairly quickly.

But this year, the run has been more like a walk. It was hardly the slap-dash action of some previous years with fish streaming up the ladder.
"It takes some time to see one. We will wait around," Butts said.
Nearby on the elevated catwalk, Matt Chandler, a salesmen from Caledonia, had stopped by to see the same.
"I came to see if the fish were jumpin' yet, but there's not much happening. It's been very slow."

"Slow" is the word being mouthed by more than fish ladder visitors. It's become a common refrain this year from anglers on the Grand River and fish biologists alike. Even Lake Michigan charter captains have noticed a difference.
"This is one of the worst years I've seen down here at the Sixth Street dam," said James Gordon, a Grand Rapids angler, who has been fishing the river since he was a young man. "When we got those three days of rain, what was here just shot through."

Mike Pitton, a Belmont angler and a regular at Sixth Street, said coho salmon came through first and quickly. Then the big kings began to show up.
The fishing then was interrupted by heavy rains three weeks ago that caused the river to rise several feet and become unfishable. Pitton suspects the big kings blew upstream during that high-water event.
"I think they're long gone," Pitton said.

Chinook salmon now are showing up on the Grand River near Lansing, according to state officials.

"There are a decent number of fish up there," said Jay Wesley, the DNR fisheries supervisor for southwest Michigan. "I wouldn't say the run is off, but the catch has been. We've been hearing that on the Web and from anglers."
Wesley could not say how many fish had moved upstream on the Grand River nor how that compared with other years, but anglers on Lake Michigan are noticing a difference.
"My limit catches are down by 40 percent over last year," said Denny Grinold, past president of the Michigan Charter Boat Association and owner of Old Grin Charters in Grand Haven. "There are less Chinook out there and fewer limit catches."

State fisheries officials say that may be true. Michigan cut its Lake Michigan salmon stocking effort by 30 percent in 2006, reducing the number of planted salmon from 2.3 million to 1.6 million per year. Fish managers hoped to establish a fishery more in balance with a declining alewife population, the forage salmon eat. Other Lake Michigan states followed suit. The result was a 25 percent lakewide reduction in stocking.

"Our goal in 2006 was reduce the number of salmon out in the lake," said Mark Tonello, the DNR fisheries supervisor for northwest Michigan. "We were going to a sustainable fishery and trying to get away from the boom and bust.
"I would not have predicted a smaller salmon run as a result, but I've heard the Grand Haven pier guys didn't have much of a Chinook fishery this fall, and we've had a lower-than-normal run on the Little Manistee River up here.
"It's not unheard of for us to get a run late in October but, as of right now, the salmon run has not shaped up the way we thought it would."
DNR staffers annually collect salmon eggs for the Chinook stocking program at a small weir located on the Little Manistee River. Workers this year barely got enough eggs to meet the program quota during the first week of October, when the take usually occurs.
Fisheries technicians collected 3.9 million Chinook salmon eggs for Michigan's stocking program and managed another 600,000 for Indiana's Lake Michigan stocking effort.
"On a good year we normally would provide Illinois with a million eggs too," said Ed Eisch the hatchery manager for Michigan's Oden, Harietta and Platte River fish hatcheries. "But this year, it was sketchy."
Tonello said the runs may be coming later in his region. He called the Big Manistee salmon run "pretty good" and said there were no complaints so far about the Betsie River.
"There are lots of different scientific explanations about what it takes for salmon to run, but in the end, they run when they want," Tonello said.