End of Spring - Start of Summer - Update

Hello Everyone,

With spring of 2015 officially in the rearview mirror, I'd like to update everybody on the fishing status out of Waukegan Harbor.

Let's start with where my last report ended on April 30. As we entered May, we were catching some coho but the big schools had not yet arrived. We had moderate success up until Mother's Day weekend when the fish arrived overnight. Limits of were taken over the weekend and throughout the rest of the month. We did encounter days here and there where the bite was unusually slow and that seemed to be highly correlated with fishing pressure. Each spell rebounded with new batches and catches of fish into the end of May and throughout June.

June is in the books now too and it yielded pretty good fishing for a multi-species catches of coho, kings, and lake trout and some steelhead were taken too.

About two weeks into July now and looking back to the end of June, we were seeing some large catches of lake trout. We are hearing about this south of us off Chicago too. At the time of this writing, the lake trout catches off Waukegan were on the decline at the moment. But decent numbers are still being seen. This could likely change again soon too.

Meanwhile, there are still some coho scattered all over our reachable water and we are seeing days where some king salmon are being caught too. Some steelhead are being caught as well.

So it seems we are in a bit of a transition period still. Where large quantities of king salmon have not yet been seen, but some are around, which is typically the cornerstone of summer fishing here. Some are arriving and we have seen them in a variety of sizes. For the most part though, they remain pretty strictly inside of 100 feet of water. In the meantime, we continue to fill the gaps with all of the other species. However, not in huge numbers.

We hope this changes soon with more kings and time is now on our side.


Thanks for reading,
Capt Rick
Windycitysalmon.com