Manitowok Salmon

After a day of chasing very the very last remnants of the king salmon run on the Sheboygan River the afternoon before we were ready for an improvement. We'd spoken to the creel survey guy and he'd suggested we hit the Manitowok River just north. We had few other options. The trip consisted of myself, my buddy Ted and my father visiting from Australia. We had tried to intercept early run kings in September in blisteringly hot conditions and hooked only one fish (and it wasn't landed) and the first day of the trip was also a bust - it wasn't looking good and he wasn't too impressed with "this salmon fishing".

When we arrived at the river there were no cars or people - that wasn't a good sign and the water was a bit off colored but as we walked down the stairs into the deep valley we could begin to make out the shape of fish in the shallows. Once into the water it soon became clear there was more than a few, and within an hour we realize the place was swarming with them. You would kick them and step on them as you waded through the stream, their wakes showing as they pushed upstream to get away from the threat. Unfortunately though, most of them had been in the river a fair while.

The old man hooked up with his first king salmon

A relatively fresh hen

Ted immediately went downstream but I hung around to see what the old man could do. It didn't take long before he was hooked up with his first fish of the day. A relatively fresh hen and not bad to look at and of reasonable size. She fought pretty well and took the old man a good fifteen minutes to land. A few minutes later he hooked up again, this time with an old, black buck. The fight this time was what you'd expect of a fish that had spent so much time in the river, but still the fish never want you to reach over and pick them up. After that I we didn't bother with pictures as the fishing was fairly constant.

An average size buck that has spent some time in the river

Just to show I was in on the act as well

The biggest problem was the sheer number of fish in the river. Getting salmon to strike an egg sucking leech is hard enough but when there are so many fish it is impossible to avoid jagging fish, often! Although most times the hook pulls out with a steady yank of the rod there is still considerable time spent chasing foul hooked and grumpy salmon around. Still, despite this it was a good days fishing and the rods were bent for the largest percentage of the day. The most important part was my dad experiencing it. The river had nobody else on it, it was scenic and the elk (not wild but from a farm) were bugling in the distance. To top it off it began snowing as we left and that's quite something for a boy from the tropics.