The fools and naysayers said it couldn`t be done, that no one would catch a whitefish in southern Lake Michigan.
Tell that to Ray Kranzow of Villa Park.
Kranzow has in his freezer a 14-pound, 3-ounce whitefish that has broken the Michigan record by a pound.
He was trolling for lake trout July 11 on the bottom in 100 feet of Michigan water east of Michigan City, Ind., when the whitefish bit his lightly fluttering hammered spoon.
Kranzow said he wasn`t sure what it was at first. Local anglers still are not used to catching whitefish, which are enjoying a resurgence in this part of the lake.
But as soon as he learned it was a whitefish, Kranzow spoke words that forever shall warm the cockles of this beleaguered journalist`s heart.
”Well, I guess I got Husar off the hook,” he said.
Yours truly has been rolling with some low punches from a handful of Chicago charter boaters who object to my assertions that whitefish constitute a new sport fishery here. They fear customers may ask them to chase whitefish rather than their specialty of salmon and trout. One official of an otherwise responsible salmon organization has labeled the whitefish as nothing more than a lie. There are no whitefish around here, he insists.
In fact, Lake Michigan is full of whitefish. Fisheries scientists have documented their improvement for more than a dozen years, according to Michigan State University ichthyologist Thomas Coon. ”We get more and more inquiries about them every fall,” said Michigan biologist Joan Duffy, who keeps track of the southern stretch of lakefront.
The surprise has been their steady movement into the lake`s extreme southern reaches. While they notably occur off St. Joseph, Mich.-where the previous record was caught-whitefish now extend around the curve of the lake into Illinois.
Local anglers have caught whitefish off Chicago breakwalls in the fall and spring, where they presumably stay through the winter. A big question has been where to find them in the summer, when they disappear into greater depths. An even bigger question is how to catch them from those depths once they can be found.
Kranzow, a veteran tournament troller who says he won the first Alpena brown trout tourney in Michigan, was hoping for lakers when he marked a large school near the bottom. He worked the school with his downriggers, but caught no lakers-only that single whopper whitefish.
”It made me think that all those fish down there might have been whitefish,” Kranzow said. ”I suppose if you could jig for them, they could be caught on worms and nightcrawlers.”
Experience elsewhere has shown that whitefish can be caught on vertically jigged Sonars or Bullet Baits. They also should be vulnerable to a new device called Speedhook, a spring steel contraption that snaps a hookset when the leader is tugged. It is ideal for fishing great depths. Tie a Speedhook rig onto a weighted line and the fish should hook themselves. Tip the Speedhook with grubs, worms or small shrimp-the usual food whitefish find on the bottom. I recommend that lakefront trollers keep handy either blade bait or Speedhook rigs in case they encounter a mysterious school of deep fish that won`t bite conventional downrigged lures.
”There`s no question that whitefish keep to tight schools,” Coon said.
”And there`s no doubt at all that a lot of them are out there.”
Here`s a nice thought to keep in mind as we tackle the challenge of whitefish in southern Lake Michigan: Those things have been quietly recovering for years-undisturbed and underfished. There should be some real trophies out there.
– More on the controversial dumping of Art Lawton`s 35-year-old musky record: Lawton`s niece, Diane Sharp, has surfaced in Delmar, N.Y., bristling with indignation. She says she is contemplating a lawsuit based on the manner in which a researcher acquired a collection of her uncle`s pictures.
”He said he represented the National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, which he didn`t, and he wanted them for the museum,” Sharp said. ”To me, this was deceitful. If I`d known he was going to use them to invalidate my uncle`s record, I probably would have given them anyway. As a teacher, I believe in a search for truth. I also would have given them because I would have thought they supported my uncle`s claim.”
Sharp said her uncle`s photos of the claimed 69-pound, 15-ounce musky never were hidden. ”He brought them to my house in a suitcase before he died,” she said. ”He was going to throw out a lot of things, but I told him they belonged to the family. They were never lost. I knew where they were. I just never knew that anyone wanted them.”
