Last night I ended up in a situation where I was very annoyed at my 13 year old son. Anyone who has had a teenager, I am sure can relate. As a result I holed up in my office and decided to watch a video from Trollers Unlimited out of Chicago and uncovered a treasure that I didn’t know existed.

They had a guest speaker Dr. Mitch Zischke with the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant. The video covers a wide variety of topics including, the changing food web, buoys and the impact of Covid on the Great Lakes charter fishing industry.

One bit of information that I found particularly interesting was a website Dr. Zischke shared called Fish Atlas. Fish Atlas provides a visual display of fishing charter catch rate data since the mid 1990’s by species. The site isn’t the most user friendly and intuitive but once you get the hang of the interface, the information you can get from it I think is quite useful.

For example, I looked at average catch per trip numbers for 2019 near St. Joseph Michigan. For March 2019, the average King Salmon catch per trip was 0.44 fish per trip. For April 2019, the average King Salmon catch per trip increased to 2.98 fish per trip. Then in May 2019, the average King Salmon catch per trip dropped to 2.57 fish per trip. In June the numbers really drop off to an average King Salmon catch per trip dropped to 0.03 fish per trip and stay low through July. By August the average catch per trip for King’s jumps back up to 1.85.

Where this data becomes really interesting is if you travel to different ports to fish, you can plan your trips to according to when the best catch rates are for any given species.