Lake Michigan kings and coho building as Chicago's June window peaks

What's Biting

What's Next

Over the next two to three days, anglers working the Chicago shoreline should plan around the new moon window that peaks tonight (June 17). New-moon phases tend to concentrate active feeding toward low-light bookends, making the pre-dawn troll out of Chicago-area harbors the highest-percentage play for Chinook and coho this week.

With no live buoy data available this cycle, water temperatures are unconfirmed, but typical mid-June conditions on southern Lake Michigan place the productive thermocline in the 40–80 foot depth range. Trollers running downriggers or leadcore rigs to keep spoons and body baits at depth historically find the strongest king contact through the remainder of June. The WI DNR Lake Michigan Fishing Report credited strong alewife forage classes for driving the exceptional 2024 salmon survival — that same forage base continues to support actively feeding fish this season.

Coho tend to run shallower than kings in midsummer, making them accessible on planer-board spreads with lighter spoons out to 100–150 feet of line. Running a mixed spread — deep downriggers for kings, shallower boards for coho — gives you the best coverage across both species on a single run.

For nearshore anglers, Tactical Bassin's recent Great Lakes smallmouth session is the clearest current-season signal available. Windy days have been productive, with bass locked onto hard-bottom transitions and responding to a power-then-finesse swimbait approach: lead with the Dark Sleeper to draw aggressive strikes, then follow with the Spark Shad to pick up cautious followers once the school is located. Typical June southwest and northwest wind events off the Chicago lakefront should keep this pattern productive through the coming days.

Plan trips around first light to roughly 9 a.m. New moon, afternoon chop, and summer boat traffic all converge to make the early window most consistent across every target species this week.

Context

Mid-June on Lake Michigan near Chicago sits at the heart of the summer salmon season — historically the most productive window before surface temperatures peak and fish push into the depths to shadow thermocline-staged alewives. Chinook and coho are typically at their most accessible right now, staged in the 60–120 foot range and responsive to trolled spoons and body baits before the mid-July heat sets in.

The WI DNR Lake Michigan Fishing Report provides the most useful benchmark context available this cycle: the 2024 season produced record coho numbers — more than 210,000 harvested — and the strongest Chinook showing since 2012, with over 160,000 fish. Strong alewife year-classes were directly credited for improved salmon survival and body condition across the lake. Those well-fed cohorts are now maturing and distributed throughout the system, and Illinois trollers stand to benefit from that carryover into the 2025 and 2026 seasons.

Compared to leaner periods earlier in the 2010s, when alewife population crashes suppressed salmon survival and forced stocking reductions across the Great Lakes, the current population trajectory looks considerably healthier. June 2026 enters this backdrop with multiple strong year-classes in the system simultaneously — an optimistic setup by historical standards.

On the bass side, June is squarely in prime Great Lakes smallmouth season: fish have completed spawning and are transitioning from staging areas to summer feeding lies on deep rock piles, current breaks, and hard-bottom transitions. Tactical Bassin confirms this shift is already playing out on the Great Lakes. No Illinois-specific comparative current-season data is available from feeds this cycle, so on-water reports from local charter fleets and bait shops near Chicago harbors remain the most reliable real-time check before committing to a run.