ESPN Freshwater

Summer means coho and king salmon fishing on Lake Michigan and Lake Ontario. Double-digit beauties are now replacing the 7 and 8-pound fish that were prevalent in livewells this spring. Whereas early in the year fish might have been located in water anywhere from 20 to 50 feet deep, now they've relocated to deeper depths.

The deep waters of Lake Michigan and Lake Ontario have salmon waiting for the angler who knows how to locate and catch them.

Finding the right water temperature is the key to finding the salmon.

"Temperature dictates where we fish," said Lake Michigan fishing guide Capt. Bob Rossa (815-338-8093; 815-575-8665).

"The main forage fish are alewives for all the fish. They kind of like water temperatures at 52 to 54 degrees, if you find the forage fish you're going to find the salmon. In the spring we're looking for warm water, but as the summer goes on we're looking for cooler water, that 52-degree water."

Lake Ontario fishing guide Capt. Doug Stein (716-774-0077; 716-912-6972) agrees with Rossa.

"Salmon don't like 72 degrees. They like the colder water, 47, 50, 51 degrees. Optimal fishing depth we can run a rod then is 50 feet. If the thermal break is way down deep, at 100-plus feet of water, that's really hard to fish then, or if it's right up on top the fish are scattered all over the place, so we don't like to see that either."

In the spring, anglers are fishing in 20 to 30 feet of water. In the warm months of summer, the fish may go as deep as 250 feet. The water stratifies and both Rossa and Stein look for the thermocline.

The thermocline is the transition layer between the warm water near the surface and the deeper, colder water.

The top layer and the deepwater layer are relatively uniform in temperature, while the thermocline represents the transition zone between the two.

"We can actually mark the thermal break on our graphs, and we always run temperature probes to confirm the position of the thermal break," said Stein.

"We're looking for the thermocline," said Rossa.

"If we can find any major 2- or 3-degree temperature break, that's actually like structure to us. The fish hit a wall of cold water and they tend to stay right on that break."

Rossa uses both downriggers and Dipsy Divers to get his bait to that level. The round shape of the diver and the adjustable multi-directional feature allows the bait to track straight behind the boat, or off to the port or starboard.

"We have probes on our downriggers that tell us the exact depth we're fishing," said Rossa.

"Say we put it down 50 feet. We'll get a digital read-out of what the water temperature is 50 feet down."

"We use electronic ones with a line counter on the downrigger," said Rossa.

"We just trip the switch and down it goes until we get the depth we're looking to put the lure into. Then we use a thing called a Dipsy Diver, which is a round, plastic weighted disk off the side of the boat. You can run more lines off it. On those we always run line-counter reels. I know that if I put out 240 feet of line, the Dipsy on a No. 3 setting, the bait will be at 75 feet. If we find a level where the fish are, we can tweak our whole spread right into that level. Line counters let us get it to the foot."

Rossa likes to run flies behind the diver. Fly size is about 3 to 3½ inches long.

"I tie my own, but a lot of guys use Howie flies," he said.

"In the springtime we use little, maybe inch-size ones tied to the hook. As the fish get bigger and the alewives get bigger, we use Howie flies and a bigger dodger, dodgers just kind of wobble."

"There are these other things we use called flashers, which do a 360 rotation." The flasher serves as attractors to the salmon.

"They're made out of plastic; they just do a big barrel roll in the water and the fly keeps flicking behind."

One theory of why the rig works is that the attractor looks like a tightly balled school of alewives and the fly looks like one is lagging behind.

Stein and Rossa both use different colored spoons at this time of the year, preferably darker colored spoons.

"I get salmon on the other colored spoons, but the optimal colors would be maybe purples and blacks, or purples and burgundy colors or light purple colors and glow tape," said Stein.

"The fish just love glow tape, different variations of glow green. That is a real popular tape, put diagonally on the spoon. Another popular tape is glow ladder back run down the spoon with maybe a silver laser color over the top, purple on top, green on top, or even orange on top, kind of herringbone effect running across the top of the spoon."

The glow tape gives the versatility to change to whatever color without having to change lures.

The tape retains natural light so the fish can see the bait better.

Newer spoons are touting super glow performance. In 47-degree water, tests have shown the spoons continued to glow brightly for up to three hours, some even longer.

Trolling speed is about 3 mph.

"We always pretty much go by down speed," said Stein. "Down speed" refers to the speed of the spoon at the depth which it is running.

"We use our temperature probes off our downriggers. Also speed indicators, so if we run a spoon down 50 feet, our spoon speed might be different because of different underwater currents. We actually go by the speed of the underwater currents where the spoons are running."

Salmon fishing in Michigan and Ontario turns on once the summer months are here. Remember that finding the fish depends on finding the fish's preference in water temperature.

As Stein said, "temperature breaks are like structure. The fish will congregate around changes in temperature."

Stock a good selection of baits in the boat, especially spoons.

"I have a huge assortment of tape. Probably in my boat alone I have well over 1,500 spoons, 20 trolling rods, and probably one big box of different variations of tape."

He and his parties fish from a twin-screwed 28-foot Baja.Stock up on spoons, glow tape, and flies.

Make sure the downriggers are working correctly because the salmon fishing is going to get hot just like the weather.

Pack the sunscreen and the polarized sunglasses and have fun catching summer salmon on Lakes Michigan and Ontario.

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