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Donald, Michael and I have participated in a real reversal in the ecology of the Great Lakes eco-system--in this case a change for the better. Upon the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway about the time that I was in college in Michigan, a plague of herring-like alewives flooded the Big Lakes. After several seasons of die-offs that had cottage owners bulldozing tons of the baitfish off beaches, a biologic control system was used in which the Michigan trout were seen to return to the Great lakes and forage voraciously on the baitfish. When salmon species were introduced into the Michigan rivers, they also came back from the Great Lakes on spawning runs, having fattened to good fighting form on the baitfish they brought under control. At the same bridges over the Grand River in Grand Rapids where I had as a boy dropped rocks on trash fish such as gar and carp, my parents had later gone when I was away at medical school to watch the salmon climb the fish ladders around dams and rapids in the Grand. Now, a new epidemic hit--"Coho Fever!"
Small towns in Michigan that had dwindled and died, like Grayling, Michigan, were now the site of feeding frenzies from which fisherman launched by waders or boats into the rivers thick with salmon during the fall run. You see here a somewhat earlier process in which Michael and I are showing off one of the Lake Michigan silver Coho salmon caught in the great lake itself in late summer before the fall river run begins. Donald, Michael and I each caught three different salmon species by trolling with downriggers for this new bounty of the Great Lake State.