Stephen Rose and I visited the Milwaukee River yesterday afternoon. Look at that picture down there. Isn’t that a beautiful place? That could just a well be the West Fork of the Chippewa River in Vilas County. But it’s not. It’s in Milwaukee.

Stephen and I have talked frequently about what it means to have “non-invasive” non-native fish in our water system. I found out that the village of Grafton, which had a referendum on what to do with the dam in their community, voted to keep the dam in place, but to put in a fish way to allow fish passage up and down the river. The DNR, later on, determined that it would be a bad idea to allow fish to migrate upstream of Grafton because of the risk of invasive species like Asian Carp invading the upper Milwaukee River system. At some level I agree that it would be good, if Asian Carp were to make their way into the Great Lakes, for them to be prevented from invading the upper Milwaukee River. But I also think it would be a good thing for Brook Trout to be able to migrate from spawning areas in the Northern Kettle Moraine creeks all the way out to Lake Michigan and back. We’re not going to get anywhere in reintroducing native Coaster Brook Trout into the Lake Michigan Tribs if they can’t get from the lake up to the creeks at the upper reaches of watersheds like the Milwaukee River.

So, how do we all determine what’s best? How is the presence of large, non-native predatory salmonids in the Great Lakes appropriate? Salmon and Steelhead are certainly admirable creatures. Their migrations are awe-inspiring and spectacular. But how does their presence negatively affect the native Bass, Pike, Suckers, and Whitefish, not to mention Brook Trout and Lake Trout, both of which are also native?

These questions are larger than me. Many people don’t even care, or don’t even know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe we humans are programmed to reshape our world to our liking, and introducing Salmon and Steelhead into the Great Lakes is just part of our role in the world.

Anyway, a couple of boys were fishing along the bank and were slinging lures at Salmon. They didn’t know what they were doing. They weren’t having any luck. One ended up snagging one in front if its tail and was having trouble getting it to hand. I asked if I could lend a hand, and waded over to collect the fish, pull the hook out, and give it to the boy for his buddy to take a picture. He was genuinely in awe of the creature, a large, toothy fish half his height in length.

He asked if I’d caught any and I said no, I hadn’t. He wished me luck and as I left he expressed his love for the Milwaukee River. So, did that Salmon get him to fall in love with the river? It probably had a lot to do with it. And that, to me, seems like a good thing. If people care about a place because of their experiences there, it makes sense to provide them with cool things to experience in that place. It’s hard to fall in love with a polluted and fishless river. But a clean, swift moving river full of big fish will draw a lot of visitors to it. Those visitors will want to see that the river is taken care of. So maybe introducing Salmon and Steelhead is overall a positive. It’s hard for me to say. Perhaps you have some ideas? I’d love to hear what you all have to say.

 

Milwaukee River, October 25, 2013

As I’d hoped, I was able to sit down for a few hours and tie some streamers to use in my pursuit of Steelhead on the swing.

Here’s the fruit of my labor. Those on the right are based on the Great Lakes Blue-Gold Intruder and those on the left are based on the Egg Sucking Tarantula Hairy Leg Leech, both found at OregonFlyFishingBlog.com. There are some other odds and ends in the box as well.

Hopefully these new flies will catch me some fish!

 

Steelhead Streamer Box

 

 

I got a delivery today. Looks like somebody’s going to be tying some Steelhead flies this weekend…

 

Raw materials from The Caddis Fly Shop (Click the pic to go there…)

I fished in Milwaukee on Saturday with dozens of my closest friends. There are a lot of guys out there after salmon. I haven’t got the strategy figured out yet for catching migrating salmon legally. I’m suspicious that every salmon caught in the Milwaukee River is caught via a snag. I know this debate rages on forums like Lake-Link.com with some saying they are catching them in the mouth while others go on and on about witnessing fish harvested with treble hooks in the dorsal fin. It sure looked to me like the few hooks that found salmon were stuck in places well back from the mouth.

I’m hoping in the next several weeks the salmon have run their course, the weather gets nasty, and the Steelhead are all that’s left of the lake-run fish. I’ll be out there, with a lot fewer friends, swinging streamers for Steelhead.

Speaking of swinging, I got the hang of the Skagit cast to the degree that I made every fourth or fifth cast very adeptly. I have work to do to get power into my cast so I can get them to reach a little further. Right now I’m basically able to cast the shooting head and about ten feet of running line. I need to slow things down a bit on the forward cast I guess.

Cheers!

 

Salmon Fisherman on the Milwaukee River

 

 

I’ll be heading over to Milwaukee for the weekend to visit family and while I’m there I plan to spend some time in the Milwaukee River, swinging intruder spey flies in front of Salmon and Steelhead.

Steelhead are what I’m after, of course. But I stopped in and talked with Craig Amacker, the fishing manager over at Fontana Sports in Madison. Craig relayed a story to me about a quick trip he took up to the Sheboygan River the day before. There were some salmon in the river, as you’d expect, and Craig was swinging flies. He found that many of the salmon were moving a long way to smash a fly. If I get some salmon in this manner I’ll be pleased. It’s the endless foul-hooking of salmon that I can’t stand.

So anyway…

Salmon moving to flies? Sure.

Steelhead moving to flies? You betcha!

Perhaps the odd lake-run Brown Trout? Bring it.

I have started to try tying Intruder-style streamers this fall. I found some inspiration at the Oregon Fly Fishing Blog where they have a page full of videos showing how to tie steelhead fly patterns. Last night I tied my first tube fly. We’ll see how they work out in Milwaukee…

 

Tom’s “Olde Seminal Vesicle” Steelhead Intruder fly

 

Tom’s “Patrick Petitjean” Steelhead Intruder fly (Click image for a special treat)

 

 

 

The wrecking ball has started swinging in the Menomonee River in Milwaukee this week, removing a 1,100 foot concrete channel that prevented fish from passing upstream. This work follows in the footsteps of major dam removal projects up and down the Milwaukee River that have allowed for fish and wildlife habitat restoration.

There are salmon and steelhead runs in the Menomonee River, but they’re stopped short upon reaching the concrete channel because the currents are too swift for them to swim through successfully. Restoration of the channel back to a more natural state will allow fish to explore 17 miles of water upstream, all the way up to another man made barrier, the Lepper Dam, in Menomonee Falls.

 

The flow of water has been redirected and is being pumped around it. The Wisconsin Ave. bridge is in the background. The pipes carrying the water around this section are at right and left. – Image credit: Michael Sears

The next step is for communities like Menomonee Falls and Grafton to recognize that removing obsolete dams and restoring natural rapids and falls can enhance their communities in many ways, including tourism dollars from fisherman chasing migrating fish.

Erik Helm, the Fishing Manager at Orvis in Glendale, Wisconsin has eloquently written about what could happen in either of these towns if only their residents would look back to what existed before the mill ponds.

Imagine a place like West Bend becoming a spawning habitat for steelhead. Imagine the reinvigorated riverway, no longer smelly and stale but clear-running and full of wild things. East and West, communities are working to tear down old dams, restoring beautiful, historic rivers for the enjoyment of all. Milwaukee is doing it, and yeah, Grafton and Menomonee Falls can do it too.

 

 

I found this at moldychum.com. I like the message that animals do some extreme stuff, and salmon are exemplary in their extreme-ness.

Can you imagine emulating their life cycle?

Get born, survive in a stream for a while, swim to the ocean, be a predator and get fat, then somehow figure your way back to the very spot you were born without the help of a map or the benefit of nourishment during your journey, all the while fighting and competing with your brothers and sisters for mates, spill your spawn until you’re exhausted, only to die in the process?

Salmon are, indeed, incredible.

Shred Till Death, Salmon. from Will Lyons on Vimeo.

Stephen Rose, George Reynolds and I fished the Sheboygan River today, and we saw way more fish than anyone should expect to see in one day on a river.

Salmon are crazed, sex-driven zombie-monster fish that are incredibly-impressive natural specimens. They are, as I may have mentioned before, very impressive. Nearly every fish we saw today was a King Salmon. They are all, impressively, equivalently-shaped and sized, meaning they are big. I would guess each one is fifteen pounds and about thirty inches long. That’s big. They can move from the mouth of the river to the falls in Kohler in less than twenty four hours. They are made to swim vigorously up stream, through fast and slow water, jumping if necessary. They are not concerned about anything aside from finding a nice place and a nice partner, and once those two conditions have been met, just leave them the eff alone because it’s time to squeeze out some eggs and milt and then die.

Therein lies the conundrum of fishing for lake-run salmon. They aren’t interested in you or your damned flies. Not in the least. In fact they would prefer that you all just go away. Getting a salmon to “eat” your fly is, for me anyway, nigh-on impossible, because they aren’t hungry! They can get pissed, or curious. And then they might snap at your fly. And then you will have hooked one in the mouth. But there’s this thing called “foul hooking”, which is different from “Fair Hooking”. Foul hooking means you have hooked a fish somewhere away from the fish’s mouth, like the dorsal fin or the tail fin. And this happens a lot because when you drift or swing flies through a pod of salmon the hook often sweeps over them. What you’re trying to do is sweep the fly in front of them so they get pissed and snap at it, but as often as your fly goes in front of them, it also goes past them and over them.

So then you have a fifteen pound, thirty-inch-long muscle hooked in a spot that allows the fish to have incredible resistance to your direction of pull. But you don’t necessarily know if the damned thing is hooked right or wrong, so you play the fish (instead of just snapping the fly off your line with a mighty pull). You play the fish because it feels like the biggest freaking monster you’ve ever had on your line and you just want to hoist that thing up a look at it, and then get your picture taken.

So you play it and play it and play it and it goes up and down the river and hunkers down in the holes and mingles with other salmon who say “Nice new piercing, Larry” and so forth, and then maybe when you get a look at it you see that the brilliant monster is hooked on a fin, and then you feel like a jack-ass because you’ve tormented this fish for thirty minutes only to find out the poor, sex-crazed, dying beast wasn’t sportingly hooked in the mouth, and then you can snap it off.

At least that’s what a guy like me, who hasn’t done this much, has come to conclude.

All that being said, the Sheboygan River in Kohler is a very beautiful place that I intend to visit again. And I am grateful to George for his hospitality, patience, flies and sandwiches, and I hope to repay the favor to him soon in the Driftless or the Brule or who-knows-where! I had a great day, and feeling the tug of those beasts on the line is really a thrill, no doubt about it.

Also, I’m not sure, but I think I hooked that fish I’m holding below in the mouth. Honestly I was too thrilled to have it in my hands to remember from whence the hook came as George was removing it. I felt like I’d just gotten off a bucking bronco and was happy to have that prize in my hands. These salmon are wonderful, beautiful (and impressive) creatures and watching them today was a great experience.

 

A female King Salmon in the Sheboygan River

 

George and me in Sheboygan

 

The reason for the season – Salmon Eggs

 

Stephen with a lunker on

 

A thirty minute wrestling match with a large fish in Sheboygan

 

Tomorrow I’m heading to Sheboygan with my fishing buddy Stephen, where we’ll meet up with George, a local Sheboygan-area fly-fisherman, for some Sheboygan River Salmon Fishing (S.R.S.F.).

I’m hoping for a few Kings and maybe some Coho. Sheboygan got 3.2 inches of rain over the weekend. The only question mark is whether the water will “look like cappuccino” in George’s words.

 

I’m hoping to do like this guy tomorrow…

 

I geeked out this morning and did some extrapolating (or is it forecasting?). The last time the Sheboygan River was up to 450 CFS was in June, and it came down under 200 CFS in a couple days.

 

 

Sheboygan Flow June 2012

 

I traced the downward-sloping flow rate and plastered it onto the tail end of the flow graph as of this morning, and by tomorrow the flow should be below 200 CFS. Which hopefully means we won’t drown and there will be some new fish in the river.

 

Sheboygan Flow Oct 2012

 

That’s the theory anyway.

For any of you thinking this data would be worth banking a trip on tomorrow, I’d suggest you wait until I get back so you can read my trip report before deciding to head out.

 

 

Plans are in the works for a trip up to the Bois Brule, and perhaps the Cranberry River, Flag River, White River, Marengo River, Sioux River, or who knows where. Hopefully the fish will be our guide.

I can’t wait to see that lovely tanin-stained water, hear the wolves howl, and see the flash of those silvery fish in the riffles. I’ll be keeping my eye on the fish forums to see how our chances look for getting up there during a run.

For now, here are some memories of last year’s visit…

Wood Turtle on the banks of the Bois Brule River, Wisconsin

 

 

Stephen Rose: Extreme Trout Fisherman

 

 

S. Rose on the incredible Bois Brule River, Wisconsin

 

 

The Amnicon River in Douglas County, Wisconsin