Day 3 of Fishing

Standing on the bow at dawn with my Dad, he proclaims on the third day of fishing: “From what I can tell, these are ideal conditions for fishing. 1) You’ve got a falling barometer. 2) The wind is from the Southeast. 3) The water looks good.”

It was a nice theory, particularly after two days of not catching anything.

Our first morning in South Haven, Mark and Dad did some reconnaissance, learning that nobody at in the Harbor knew much about fishing at all, and that the nearest place to buy a fishing license was the Walmart two miles away. Thus the benefits of taking your house with you turtle-style wherever you go showed through once again – we were able to buy our licenses online and print them out without ever leaving the boat. We headed out at noon that day – far too late for any real fish to bite, but enough to learn the lay of the land. We found a steady increase in depth and no salmon; in the late afternoon we headed closer to shore for some perch, but found nothing. Another boat pulled alongside us. “We saw you were parked here for an hour and hoped you were getting something,” they called. We shook our heads and didn’t say much.

On Day 2, Mark and Dad got up early enough to follow out the charter captains, hoping to get some insight into the key fishing spots. Again, we returned home empty-handed.

That evening, Mark and I took a walk around downtown South Haven in search of ice cream and information. He sweet-talked a nice lady charter captain who told him that we were doing all the right things, even using the right green “mountain dew” lures, except that the dipsy-divers should not be off-set; as it was, they weren’t going deep enough to catch the salmon. She also said that they were catching fish – not a lot, but some.

That night, there was serious discussion of the fish to be caught.











Day 3. We had done all the research, and now we had this last bit of information that would ensure the salmon would be ours for the reeling. (There is a lot of reeling to be done when you’re casting out more than five hundred feet of line – as evidenced by the black and blue marks in my thigh from bracing the pole.)

It did seem like a fortuitous morning. And the hours wore on…the gear was spread about… we were calling out the depth changes every five feet…and no fish.

Not to say that the day was without excitement. About 11 AM I was inside on the phone to my brother Jim, trying to get his advice for these fish, when I hear some ruckus on deck and somebody call, “It’s the DNR!” I came out to find a green boat with CONSERVATION on the side saddling up to Mazurka. I raced back inside for our licenses and passed them around, all of us waving them. The two guys from the Department of Natural Resources nod at us – oh yeah, we see you got your internet licenses, they say. I’m still on the phone with Jim, narrating this shake-down. “Ask them where the fish are!” he tells me. “Where are the fish??” I yell out. But the two DNR guys just look at me and laugh. “They’re here,” they say. “Somewhere.”

Somewhere. Somewhere is actually a place in time, not in the Lake. ‘Cause when we got back to Chicago and I talked to Mark’s brother Scott, another fisherman, he said the one thing we have no control over: the king salmon don’t start coming in till August.