I caught 4 chinook salmon this morning

[AngryAmish]

Just bragging.

[WeRQ4U]

1. Nice. Where?

[AngryAmish]

3. Out of East Chicago, Indiana

Ten minutes from Chicago. Believe it or not. 4 of us chartered a boat.

[WeRQ4U]

6. Wow.

Me and a few friend fished for them on teh Columbia in Oregon.

[Spinzonner]

2. There's something fishy about this post

[AngryAmish]

4. OK - that's ten minutes in the penalty box

For punning.

[fudge stripe cookays]

5. Yum!

Cedar plank em!

FSC

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

7. Back when I was working for...

Duran Duran, we had a day off in Chi-town, stayed at the Ambassador East. We chartered a boat out of the Burnham park marina, went out for Cohos. We caught 17 of them, 10 lbs and over. Kept them all. Brought them back to the hotel and cut a deal with the restaurant chef: you get all the salmon(iced down nicely) and you cook us dinner. She thought that was a wonderful deal. We thought it was a wonderful meal. The whole thing got written up in Kup's column the next day.

We carried the large cooler, brimming with Cohos, through the lobby. One of the Cohos slipped out of the brimming cooler and hit the Italian marble floor.

There is something about the echoic sound of wet fish hitting a marble floor in a crowded hotel lobby that I will never be able to forget. ;-)

[Squatch]

8. Did you put them back?

C&R is the way to go.

[AngryAmish]

9. Well, that is a problem with Lake Michigan salmon

Not supposed to throw them back unless they are less than 12 inches.

Salmon get quite stressed when reeled in. Our captain said they have a very good chance of dying.

More importantly Lake Michigan salmon are there to be caught. There is very little natural reproduction because salmon are not native to the Great Lakes. When the Erie Canal opened, it let in alewives and lampreys. Alewives are bait fish but lampreys killed most of the Lake Trout. This is a problem. The alewives' population exploded and the beaches smelled like dead fish from dead alewives. All of Lake Michigan stank - a stink that would go inland when the wind came off the lake.

So in the 60s Steelhead, Coho and Chinook salmon were introduced from Pacific stock (fisheries raised fish). Alewives went way down, the lake smells better. PLus it created a world class salmon fishing in Lake Michigan. The charter boats all guarantee that if you catch no fish you don't have to pay. But that almost never happens.

Anyway, why no catch and release? Well, if the salmon are not caught they will try to spawn in the areas where they were dumped into the lake. That means around here the harbors of Chicago. I have fished the harbors, but there is nowhere for the fish to go, and spawning fish are hard to make take a bait, they die, and the lake starts to stink again. SO - the moral of the story - for Lake Michigan salmon only- catch and release does not work. However, I have about ten pounds of fresh salmon filets in my cooler and will be barbecuing tonite.