Great Lakes Salmon And Trout

No bug slicks. No birds. Wind hums through lines and cables as the probe disappears into the blue-green depths. Foam trails are draped across the swells, some heading east, some heading west, some passing over a frenzy of kings. Because the probe says, somewhere nearby, thousands of salmon mill, cruise, and slash through pods of baitfish in an easily defined zone that, as yet, very few know how to define.

Mark Chmura, owner of Pier Pressure Charters, is one of the most insightful and instinctual captains we know of. In the past five years he’s won 15 Tournament Trail events (T.T. is the top salmon-trout circuit on the Great Lakes). Over that period, Chmura’s boat cruised to Team of The Year honors twice. He’s been on the Luhr Jensen pro staff throughout his tournament career.

Wind-related patterns, big-lake currents, invisible thermal structure, and infra-red satellite maps are old school to salmon enthusiasts that follow In-Fisherman. Chmura combined that knowledge with observations made over his many years as a Great Lakes skipper to discover something relatively new to most weekend warriors and charter captains alike: A zone of stability that resists change and collects fish.

Storms cause upwellings in the Great Lakes. Heavy wind and wave action causes cold, dense water from the depths to flip over and supplant warmer surface water, pushing it out of the shallows on the wind-driven side of the lake. But somewhere out there exists a zone of stability that never flips over.

“That zone is always there,” Chmura says. “If you look at a surface-temp map of Lake Michigan on the Internet, one side of the lake or the other will be warm and the other cold, unless we have no wind for days. The wind is constantly flipping the lake over. The stability-zone pattern is easier to follow on the cold side of the lake, because the zone is narrower and it concentrates fish a little more, plus it’s not as far out in the lake on the cold side. Especially when fish get pushed right into shore.”

The Shadow Pattern

“A sudden storm with 6- to 8-foot waves coming into shore forces some salmon to the harbor mouth,” Chmura explains. “The water rolls over, and when the lake flips you’re dealing with ice water. Salmon react one of two ways. They go out deeper or they come in shallow. Kings and steelhead, months before spawning runs, collect around the harbor mouth and on very shallow structure surrounding it, when cold water is pushed into shore. When the wind comes out of the north, the warm water bounces off shore like a billiard ball. It gets pushed into shore, then it gets pushed out after an upwelling. That cold mass of water rising from the depths can be 42°F on top, pushing some fish right up on the beach, even in July. We target those salmon with longlines and boards in 10 feet of water, right in the middle of the day.