By Mark Alexander

Last winter while watching the guys on The Next Bite TV fishing show catch the heck out of King Salmon on Lake Michigan, I decided to learn how to salmon fish and do this myself. Lake Michigan is loaded with salmon and is much closer to my home in eastern Iowa than most of the places I fish for walleye.

Once again my friend Larry Johnson was my fishing partner. The winds on Lake Michigan looked mild for the next 3 days so away we went. I warned Larry that this was my first time salmon fishing and wasn’t making any promises! Once we had my Ranger in the water we headed out into the lake and started putting lines out in 90 feet of water about 5 to 6 miles off shore. My plan was to put out 6 lines, covering water depths from 25 to 60 feet down. It wasn’t long before we had our first fish on, hitting at about 25 ft. I was pretty happy to get that first fish in the boat! That afternoon we ended up keeping 8 salmon, mostly Coho salmon. We did get one big king that hit a flasher/fly at 50 feet down. Over the next two days we found that while we would get the most hits in the 25 to 30 foot depths, the bigger kings were always on our deeper lures.

By the 3rd morning we only could keep 3 more salmon to fill our possession limit of 10 each. We decided to fish a little deeper water and hopefully hit the big kings. The plan worked as we had our last king at about 11am.

To get started in gear, after watching several You Tube videos and talking to a lot of experienced fishermen, I purchased 8 rod and reel setups. These consisted of 4 line counter reels spooled with steel wire for pulling Dipsy Divers, 2 reels spooled with lead core, and 2 reels spooled with copper wire. This gave me a broad range of depth options to hopefully put fish in the boat on any given day. All caught fish on this trip. The lures I used were mostly a combination of a fly behind an 8-inch flasher.

For anyone with an interest in salmon fishing on the Great Lakes don’t hesitate to try it yourself!