Coho and Chinook Season Rolling on Southern Lake Michigan

What's biting

What's next

The next two to three days mark the waning edge of the full moon, and on Lake Michigan that typically means feeding windows are tightest at first and last light. Salmon trollers should prioritize an early push — lines in the water before sunrise to catch the transition before surface light diffuses the bite.

As late June moves toward July, the thermocline on southern Lake Michigan consolidates. Chinook will be holding on the cold side of that break, typically found between 70 and 110 feet down this time of year. Standard presentations include spoons and flasher-fly rigs run off downriggers set to temperature. Coho ride above the thermocline and stay more accessible for anglers who can't comfortably run downriggers at full depth.

The alewife forage base has been strong in recent years — the WI DNR Lake Michigan Fishing Report cited record stocking survival in 2024, which suggests kings should be in solid condition heading into the heart of summer. Well-fed fish move with the bait, so locating alewife schools on sonar is the most direct route to finding Chinook concentrations. Mark the bait, drop the riggers, and work the depth.

For perch anglers, pier structures along the Chicago shoreline are the most consistent bet. Drop-shot rigs and small tube jigs tipped with emerald shiners, worked near bottom around current breaks, represent the standard approach for summer perch in the southern lake corridor. Evening light often fires a second feeding window worth planning around.

Smallmouth bass along the city's breakwalls and rip-rap are worth targeting in the morning hours before lake traffic builds. Wired 2 Fish's recent piece on round gobies in the Great Lakes makes the case that goby-imitating soft plastics — tube baits or creature baits worked along the bottom — have become the dominant smallmouth technique across the southern lake. Expect fish to be holding tight to structure rather than roaming. Weekend boat pressure will be high given the summer date; an early start pays double dividends on both fish activity and clear water.

Context

Late June is historically one of the more productive windows on southern Lake Michigan. Stocked coho and Chinook from the prior winter are fully grown and actively feeding, the thermocline has established itself enough to concentrate fish, and surface temperatures haven't yet pushed kings so deep that smaller boats can't reach them on downriggers.

The WI DNR Lake Michigan Fishing Report's 2024 harvest summary is the most recent hard benchmark available: coho exceeded 210,000 fish lake-wide (a record), while Chinook surpassed 160,000 (the highest since 2012). The WI DNR attributed both to improved alewife survival in recent years, which directly affects the condition and survival of stocked salmon. Illinois waters fall under the same multi-state Great Lakes management compact, so those lake-wide forage signals apply to the Chicago nearshore zone as well.

The round goby story, detailed by Wired 2 Fish, adds useful context for the smallmouth side of the fishery. Introduced via ballast water in the 1990s, gobies have paradoxically become a net positive for predatory species — smallmouth, walleye, and lake trout all benefit from the high-calorie forage base they provide. The Chicago breakwall system hosts a dense goby population, a factor that has contributed to consistently strong urban smallmouth fishing during summer months.

No hyper-local Chicago-specific data — pier catch logs, charter trip reports, or south-shore tackle-shop intel — appeared in this week's feeds, so a precise year-over-year comparison for this stretch of shoreline isn't possible to draw. Based on the lake-wide forage conditions documented by the WI DNR, we're heading into summer with a healthy salmon forage base and a well-established goby population for nearshore species. That is a reasonable foundation for a productive July ahead.