Salmon Season in Full Stride on Door County and Sheboygan Waters

What's biting

What's next

Early July marks the heart of the offshore salmon trolling window on western Lake Michigan. Chinook (king) salmon and coho are the primary targets out of Sheboygan and the Door County ports, with fish typically suspended in the thermocline — the cool, stable water column below 40 feet where alewife forage concentrates. The WI DNR Lake Michigan Fishing Report's 2024 harvest data confirms a fishery trending strongly upward, and the alewife year-classes driving those record coho returns should continue holding salmon through the thermocline into late summer.

Over the next two to three days, trollers should work the break between warmer surface water and the colder thermocline layer. Spoons, flasher-fly rigs, and stick baits trolled at 2.0–2.5 mph are the proven summer formula on these waters. Offshore divers and downriggers set to 40–70 feet are typically where July action concentrates once surface temps push upward. Sheboygan's harbor mouth and the deeper water off the southern Door County ports are historically productive staging zones at this point in the season.

The waning gibbous moon is now losing light through the week, heading toward the new moon phase. Experienced Great Lakes salmon trollers lean hard on low-light windows — the first 60 to 90 minutes after sunrise and the last hour before dark — as peak feeding periods. Plan to be off the dock before first light for the best shots at morning fish, particularly as the moon continues to wane.

Pier and harbor anglers near Sheboygan should try early-morning sessions with stick baits or live smelt worked near the surface for brown trout and stray coho. No shop or charter reports from the Sheboygan or Door County piers were available this cycle, so treat these as seasonal-pattern guidance rather than confirmed current intel.

Smallmouth bass anglers working the rocky reefs and boulder fields along the Door Peninsula's Green Bay side should find fish active through the July heat. Early morning and evening sessions on windward shorelines — using crayfish-pattern plastics or topwater presentations — are typically the most productive approach in midsummer. Weekend weather on Lake Michigan in July can deteriorate rapidly; no buoy data was available for this report, so verify conditions through NOAA's Great Lakes marine forecast before committing to an offshore run.

Context

The 2024 Lake Michigan harvest figures reported by the WI DNR Lake Michigan Fishing Report place this summer in useful long-term context. Record coho landings — more than 210,000 fish — and Chinook totals exceeding 160,000 (the best showing since 2012) reflect a fishery improving over multiple seasons, not declining. The WI DNR attributes the gains to strong alewife year-classes that increased survival rates among stocked fish. Alewives are the primary forage species underpinning the Lake Michigan salmon fishery, and their abundance ripples through harvest numbers with a two-to-three-year lag as stocked fish grow to catchable size.

For early July in Door County and Sheboygan, these population trends arrive on schedule with the historical norm. Chinook typically peak in Lake Michigan's offshore waters from late June through August, staging over deeper structure and following suspended alewife schools. Coho, which mature more quickly, can push shallower and are often accessible from piers and harbor mouths in July — particularly in low-light hours. Both species were at elevated population levels heading into 2025 and 2026 based on the 2024 data, suggesting the current season should support at least average, and potentially above-average, success for trollers running out of the region's ports.

The proposed adjustments to Lake Michigan and Green Bay lake whitefish total allowable catch, discussed at a fall 2025 WI DNR public meeting, reflect active management attention on that species — though summer is not prime season for targeting whitefish recreationally here. Whitefish tend to move to deeper, colder water as July temperatures climb, making them largely inaccessible until fall.

On the bass side, WI DNR public engagement on smallmouth management in Green Bay and northern Lake Michigan signals a population stable and significant enough to warrant dedicated management review — consistent with what most Door County anglers encounter on the rocky eastern shoreline of the peninsula through the summer.