As a Michiganian, I must admit I hoped that Tom Healy’s world-record brown trout would stand for a while. But I’m not sure the split decision that’s coming from the International Game Fish Association is ideal. And our hats should be off to Roger Hellen regardless.

The subject here is a brown trout Hellen caught last month in Lake Michigan. The 41-pound, 8-ounce fish was landed during a fishing tournament in Racine. It netted Hellen a well-earned $10,000 prize — and was a single ounce heavier than the whopper brown Healy caught last year in Michigan’s Manistee River.

That gives Hellen the world record brown trout because his is the biggest ever caught, right? Well, no. The IGFA requires that a new record must outweigh the old record by a certain percentage. In this case that amounted to 3 ounces.

So the two monsters will go in the books as co-record brown trout — until someone comes along with a 41-pound, 11-ouncer.

That’s sister-kissing on a global scale, but only on paper. Hellen’s was bigger, and even us guys from Michigan know it.

Here’s the report from the Pere Marquette River, courtesy of our friend Juri Geidans:

“20 degrees this morning (Sunday), ice forming on my rod guides, water temp 46. Had to keep dunking my rod to melt it off. Went 2-for-5 on Saturday and 2-for-7 this morning. Hard to get good photos by yourself and not beat up the fish. First shot (left) shows hen spilling eggs. Second shot (right) shows red buck with my egg cluster fly in his mouth. Black stone fly took a lot of the hits, but when it works you keep tying the same thing on.”

Thanks, Juri!

You’ve gotta love the Internet.

You open up your e-mail, and there sits a picture, sent by a friend or a friend of a friend, of a giant fish, a monster buck or some mythical creature.

Then come the details. Where, when, how. And that, of course, is how you  can tell they’re bogus. I got this picture today, Feb. 2, 2010. Here’s what the body of the e-mail said:

“Big Fish !!

“This Sturgeon was caught on the Black River at South Haven Michigan last
week.

“It weighed out at over 1,000 lbs and measured out at 11′1′. It was 56′
around the girth,
“And took over 6 and a half hours and 4 dozen beers for the 4 guys taking
turns reeling.”

Now, I know some hardy souls, folks who pooh-pooh the very notion of winter. But I can assure you that not even they would jump into Lake Michigan in short sleeves in January to show off a fish.

Because they can’t. It’s frozen.

Now, let’s assume that I’m being a little too niggling. Maybe the fish was caught last summer, that the e-mail went out a week later and is only now getting to my inbox. OK, fair enough.

But the e-mail claims the fish weighed 1,000 pounds. Uh oh. Problem. The type of sturgeon that lives in Lake Michigan is, fittingly enough, the lake sturgeon. They get big. Really big. But a thousand pounds? Half a ton? Hardly. According to the International Game Fish Association, the all-tackle world record lake sturgeon was a 168-pounder caught by Edward Paczkowski on the Georgian Bay in northern Lake Huron in 1982.

That’s a mighty big fish. And now we’re to believe that one SIX TIMES that size was caught in Lake Michigan, but no one heard about it until an e-mail circulated? Remember that in the summer of 2009, a world-record brown trout was taken from the Manistee River and made news everywhere from Newaygo to New Zealand. The angler who caught it, Tom Healy, was swamped with phone calls and interview requests from around the world. Yet a sturgeon that would have beaten the world record by 800 pounds wasn’t worth mentioning? And it was caught by “four guys”?

Ahem. You see my point. Now, let’s assume that it wasn’t a lake sturgeon but a white sturgeon, the really big kind that inhabit the Pacific coast. The world-record white sturgeon was 468 pounds, still less than half the size of our supposed Lake Michigan fish.

And we’re to assume that a saltwater white sturgeon grew to twice the world record size in fresh water more than 2,000 miles from home?

Yeah. And I’ve got a bridge for sale.

My guess is that the guys pictured were showing off a big shark, and some clever soul inserted a sturgeon in the picture via Photoshop.

And then told a real whopper.

I’ve been having a long-term debate with a somewhat stubborn and possibly dim-witted friend over how to spell the nickname of the Fish of 10,000 Casts, the muskellunge. I say it’s muskie. He says it’s musky.

I’ve always felt that “musky” was a bad smell, kind of like my friend’s opinion. So lately I’ve been polling various muskie stakeholders to answer the question once and for all. Guides. Biologists. Anglers. People from Wisconsin, where there are whole towns devoted to muskies (and it’s the state fish). If you don’t believe me, go to Boulder Junction and tell me how many muskie murals and statues there are that are bigger than you.

Here is the definitive answer. Is it muskie or musky? Answer: No.

There are smart, knowledgeable people who spell it musky. There are intelligent, informed people (and me) who spell it muskie. Sometimes when you ask them, they laugh. I’m pretty certain they wonder if I’ve somehow bumped my head. But their answers are split right down the middle.

For what it’s worth, Wisconsin people seem to lean toward musky. The spelling, that is. But it’s far from unanimous. Michigan folks, on the other hand, seem to prefer muskie. But again, nothing concrete.

Maybe the better question is whether I have enough to do with my time…

Lake herring may not mean much to you, but don’t be fooled. Some Michigan fisheries biologists say the species could go a long way toward righting what’s wrong with Lake Huron. Unfortunately, budget woes and a glacial bureaucracy are conspiring against innovation in this case.

Let’s review:

Earlier this decade, invading quagga mussels colonized the deeper parts of Lake Huron and filtered out the microscopic plant and animal matter in the middle of the lake. That starved out the little shrimp-like crustaceans who ate those small particles. When the crustaceans died off, that left smaller fish like alewives – another invasive that became a vital part of the lake’s ecology – with nothing to eat. At the same time, millions of stocked chinook salmon began spontaneously reproducing in undammed Canadian rivers that dump into Lake Huron. After several record years of salmon fishing in Lake Huron, the hungry hordes of salmon decimated the already-struggling alewives, thus eating themselves out of house and home.

Today the alewives are gone and so, for the most part, are the salmon. Michigan still stocks 1.5 million chinooks every year, but the data show that most of the salmon are dumped in the lake only to be eaten by the remaining predators. Walleyes and lake trout appear to be recovering — it turned out having alewives around was bad for them — but they’re eating desirable things like baby lake trout, yellow perch and yes, chinook salmon smolts.

Which brings us to lake herring, a native species that once roamed Lake Huron in huge numbers, feeding predators and filling the niche — pelagic planktivore by name — that alewives took over and then left empty. For reasons no one really knows, lake herring vanished from much of Lake Huron. The remaining herring could re-colonize Lake Huron, but the problem is they’re homers. They spawn where they were born, which means they aren’t really programmed to strike out for new territory.

So some smart scientists got the idea that if you could stock lake herring in their former haunts, you could refill that pelagic planktivore niche with a native fish that is more adaptive to Lake Huron’s whims, giving all those predators out there a more stable food source. As a bonus, lake herring are really fun to catch and equally good to eat.

So they carved out a little hatchery space, fought the gales of November to score a few thousand lake herring eggs, and started rearing them. After a few tries, they figured out the system, and in the last couple years a small but robust number of lake herring have been put back into Lake Huron.

In other words, it worked. One biologist said the next baby step would be to stock a half-million lake herring into Saginaw Bay and another quarter-million in Thunder Bay near Alpena, then sit back and see how they do. But now it looks like that’s on hold, and for the foreseeable future rearing efforts will stay at today’s level, about 30,000 a year, while more information is gathered.

Kurt Newman, Michigan’s Lake Huron Basin Coordinator, said the state’s management team supports lake herring restoration, but the hatcheries are at capacity, there’s little money and no one is sure whether expanding the three-year-old lake herring pilot program will even work.

Newman said that since salmon stocking was cut in 2006, that first reduced year-class is just making its way upstream to spawn for the first time. So despite evidence that chinook salmon are little more than fish food at this point, they’ll give the status quo another couple years and conduct a study that should be ready by 2013.

And the lake herring program that seemed to make sense for so many reasons will wait.

Knowledge is good, there’s no doubt about that. The problem with the wait-and-see approach here is the way Lake Huron became something else virtually overnight. It’s still changing. And by the time 2013 rolls around, there’s no way to know what the lake will have become or whether information gathered today will mean anything by then.

Greatnorthernoutdoors.net is updated with new articles every Thursday.
Previous content on hunting, fishing and other outdoor subjects can be found
under the “Outdoor Adventure” button above. Here’s what’s new for the week
of September 3, 2009:

– Securing the future: For more than a decade, Minnesota’s hunters and anglers agitated for a state fund dedicated to clean water and wildlife habitat. Earlier this decade, environmental groups began to see the wisdom of taking care of the state’s natural resources, and last fall a surprising coalition’s conservation vision became reality. When Minnesota voters passed the Legacy Amendment, they guaranteed that billions of dollars would be used over the next 25 years to preserve their outdoor heritage.

– Take a look: Tony Hansen is a deer guy, and he’ll tell you he’d rather have a good binocular with him in the tree stand than pretty much anything else — even clothing, but let’s not go there.

– On the fly: Long-time Michigan fly shop owner Steve Southard tells why fly fishing is so special to him — and why the sport is no longer just for the big-money crowd.

– New video: Late summer is the time to scout your deer ground, but be careful. It
doesn’t take much for that big buck to figure out he’s being hunted, and
when that happens it could be game over before the season even begins. Face
it: He’s going nocturnal at some point, and if he figures out what you’re up
to, you might never see him again. Tony Hansen explains how to be smart
about scouting that deer to improve your chances of seeing him during the
hunting season.

I’ve been a sucker for a good field guide as long as I can remember, so I was absolutely delighted when The ROM Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of Ontario showed up on my desk.

It makes little difference that I’m in Michigan; with very few exceptions the fishes that live in Ontario can also be found across the northern United States, especially in the Great Lakes region.

This guide is complete and easy to understand. It breaks the fish into families, and each species account describes in detail physical characteristics, habitat and behaviors, and includes several pictures, a map showing the species range in Ontario, and a small chart listing average and record sizes (in metric and standard measures). It includes every species from the teensiest minnow to the mighty muskellunge.

The images used in the species accounts are a useful combination of photographs and illustrations that show the fish from different angles. The guide also includes 43 pages of images showing the fish side-by-side with similar species and pointing out the distinguishing characteristics of each, an extremely handy feature for identifying species that are easily confused.

One extremely minor complaint — and I understand this is an American talking about Canadian fish and that we Yanks are as guilty of this as anyone — is that the maps showing the range of each species stops right at the border, even out in the middle of the Great Lakes. I’ve never liked it when American publishers do that, either. But in the ROM’s defense, the title makes it clear these are the fishes of Ontario. For the most part I know which ones cross that line.  

Compiled by Erling Holm and Marry Burridge, both assistant curators of ichthyology at the Royal Ontario Museum, and Nicholas E. Mandrak, a research scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the ROM Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of Ontario (ROM 2009, softcover, $29.95) is an excellent resource.

Last year, when the Inland Consent Decree granted certain hunting and fishing rights to Michigan’s first people — aka the Tribes — there was a good bit of concern over how those rights would affect everyone else. Some people said tribal members would just hunt wherever they wanted and ignore property lines. Others feared that the spring walleye spearing season — for tribes only — would erupt into fights and mayhem like they did in Wisconsin a few years back.

It looks like the pre-emptive complaining made a bigger splash than the actual activities. In fact, nothing much changed.

Now comes word that the Inter-Tribal Fisheries Program has basically donated 70,000 walleye fingerlings to the Michigan DNR to stock into Big Bay de Noc in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The fish were surplus after the tribes reared what they needed.

It was the first such gift in the memory of Jim Dexter, the state’s Lake Michigan basin coordinator, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Thanks to the fish disease VHS, Michigan’s hatcheries are working at a severely reduced capacity. Where a normal Bay de Noc plant would include as many as a half-million fish, this year it would have been closer to 200,000.

Those gift fish put the total of walleye stocked in the bay for 2009 between 250,000 and 300,000.

In other words, they made a difference.

If you haven’t had a chance to visit Lake Superior State University’s fish cam, you should. When the fish start stacking up, it really is fascinating to watch.

The cam is located in the St. Mary’s River, the outlet that carries Lake Superior’s overflow into Lake Huron and on to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s also home to runs of steelhead in the spring, Atlantic salmon in the summer and chinooks — what’s left of them — in the fall.

Activity varies — it’s nature, after all — and it’s not unusual to see whitefish, suckers and other river inhabitants. Today it looks like the Atlantic salmon are making their way in from northern Lake Huron. Numerous fish swim right in front of the camera, giving you an up-close look at what life in the big lake does to a fish. You can see the clipped fins that tell what year the fish was stocked. Many have lamprey marks on them.

Worse, a disturbingly high number of salmon are actually carrying those vile bloodsuckers. I saw one fish with two lampreys on it.

There’s no two ways about it: Those are nasty critters. I mean, we know they’re out there. We know what they do. But seeing so many of them on fish is pretty disturbing. Efforts are ongoing to rid the Great Lakes of sea lampreys. But clearly there’s plenty of work to do.

Note to  self: Graphite conducts electricity.

That was demonstrated clearly and almost tragically this week when a couple Missouri anglers withstood a serious whack from a lightning bolt. Gabe Neal was holding a graphite rod when the strike came, knocking him out of the boat. The strike lit his 17-year-old son Christian’s hair on fire; they were rescued by Iraq war veteran Andy Flippin.

The rod Gabe Neal was holding looked like a horse tail after the strike,  with all its individual fibers separated.

Thankfully, both Neals will be OK, according to news reports. Which makes it a good reminder to the rest of us that a fishing rod can be the last thing you want in your hand when there’s electricity in the air.