He figured one upside to landing back in his home state was that he could once again hit Lake Huron's fall salmon run.įor a brief few decades, those biologists had turned this Great Lake into a Pacific chinook factory, taking a wildly popular sport fish from faraway ocean waters and setting it loose to gorge upon the swarms of invasive alewives that had decimated native fish species. Hall moved away soon after and only recently returned to Michigan to care for his aging mother.
Hall and a friend rolled home to Flint that 1989 day, arms sore from fighting the 20-pounders, the back seat of their Geo Metro folded down to make space for coolers loaded with pale-orange fillets. And the old guy who filleted mounds of bronze carcasses for a dollar apiece - slicing and slinging fish skins into garbage cans with what seemed to be one fluid motion. But what he recalled most vividly was the crisp fall air tinged with the scent of burning hardwood from a nearby salmon smokehouse. Hall remembered the carnival of the harbor parking lot. Reeling in "king" salmon back then was blue-collar sport - all you needed was a pole and patch of public shoreline. Like so many of eastern Michigan's coastal towns back then, Harrisville swarmed each fall with shoreline anglers plucking chinook out of the lake with such regularity it was as if they were coming off a General Motors assembly line. To grasp the depth of Hall's disappointment, you have to understand where he was coming from: Fall, 1989, the last time he went salmon fishing along the shoreline in Harrisville. "It's just - it's just depressing," he said in a voice as flat as the glassy harbor. Since then the salmon population has declined significantly. Hall didn't get a bite but remembers Harrisville swarming with salmon fisherman in 1989, the last time he went fishing along the Lake Huron shoreline. Jay Hall of Flint, Michigan drove about two hours from his home to go salmon fishing in Harrisville Michigan on Oct.
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