![]() They hadn’t caught anything yet, but his uncle had just redone their shot. It was his second time powerline fishing. I’m with my uncle.” The boy’s name was Jake. “Sure,” he smiled and said to his shoes when I asked if we could talk, “but I’m not an expert. Twenty feet down the harbor, a 15-year-old boy with black hair and shy dark eyes was unwrapping tamales. ![]() Then, we said our goodbyes and good lucks. “It’s beautiful,” said Andrii, “it’s so very nice.” He wanted to try some bird-watching next he’d heard Waukegan was a good spot, as well as Zion, Illinois. The topic switched to the birds flying over our heads. Since then, alewives have vastly diminished, but to lure hobby fishermen and their dollars, Great Lakes states continue to stock salmon, albeit in fewer numbers-partially because there are fewer alewives to sustain them and partially because the fish are now breeding on their own.Īndrew? Andrew, but actually in Ukraine? I’m Andrii. Books can and have been written about the choice made by former Michigan state fisheries chief Howard Tanner to fight the invasion of one non-native species of fish (alewives) with the introduction of another (salmon). With this technique, fishermen can shoot their lines a couple hundred yards out, reaching the cooler waters preferred by coho and Chinook salmon, stocked in the Great Lakes since the mid-60s. (They may have a business interest in keeping that story alive, but, family-run since opening in 1958, they were also here to see it.) A fisherman at Montrose Harbor practices powerline fishing. With a weighted line, a pressurized canister, and a little Big-Shouldered chutzpah, fishermen at Montrose Harbor have been catching fish this way since the 1950s, when they invented the method right here, according to the owners of the Park Bait Shop 100 yards behind us. Next to the man, a red extinguisher, filled with CO2 instead of chemical fire retardant. Attached to the broomstick was a reel of fishing line crowned with a little gold bell. A puff of vapor floated above a man crouched near a five-gallon bucket with what appeared to be the upper half of a broomstick protruding from it. From farther down the harbor, I heard a sound like the firing of a Nerf gun but much louder. Minnows were strung evenly along it like Christmas lights the ones that were still alive twitched. The man with the flashlight freed one of the lines and stretched it out along the pier. The white noise of the waves mixed with DuSable Lake Shore Drive. His friends clustered around him, narrowly avoiding kicking over the Dunkin’ Donuts coffees on the ground next to their gear. One line had crossed with another, creating a mess, but not for nothing: the water rippled. Then I found Lloyd with his camera, watching a man with a flashlight on his head struggle with two fishing lines as he complained in a language neither of us spoke. Despite living here for years, I’d never seen the sunrise break over the water, but I made it just as the sun burst up from the lake, a fiery orb. ![]() I myself was also running-from the bait shop where I’d parked my car to where the harbor juts furthest out into Lake Michigan-late as always to meet up with documentary photographer Lloyd DeGrane, who’d suggested this adventure. The salmon were running, was the word: they were there to catch them, and I was there to see them do it. They biked here from West Ridge, tackle boxes and buckets rattling in a little wagon behind them. They woke up at two and drove from Indiana they slept on their sisters’ couches. Like the migratory birds in the wooded sanctuary behind them, the 20 or so fishermen who dotted the harbor were from everywhere: Kenosha and Cambodia, Elk Grove and Ukraine, Logan Square and Germany. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & RecreationĪt sunrise on March 26, all of Montrose Harbor was anticipation and birdsong. ![]()
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