It's minutes before sunrise on Lake Michigan, and you're sipping a warm cup of coffee to wash down a glazed jelly doughnut freshly made the night before at a local bakery.

Two Lake Michigan anglers show off a trio of salmon and one steelhead taken from the Algoma pier. Photo by Kevin Naze.

Or maybe the sun has just dipped below the horizon on a steamy summer evening, and you're holding onto an ice-cold can of your favorite beverage.

The lake is calm -- barely a ripple -- and your mind drifts.

Just then, a fishing rod jerks toward the water's surface and begins pumping wildly as line furiously melts from the reel.

The sound of the screaming drag has everyone in the boat moving at the same time, and you lunge to grab the rod from its holder.

FISH ON!
This high-intensity experience is repeated thousands of times each summer off Wisconsin ports from the Illinois border to Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Whether you take a charter boat trip, launch your own rig or step aboard the vessel of a friend, each outing offers a chance for the next salmon you hook to be the largest you've ever tangled with.

Add a tournament, with prizes and bragging rights on the line, and you'll feel an extra adrenaline rush with each smack down on a favorite lure.

Anglers often battle fatigue as well as fish, with most participants rising between 3 and 4 a.m. to take advantage of the pre-dawn bite. A lot of the heavyweights are reeled in within an hour or two of sunrise and sunset, though certainly not all of them.

Part of the allure of Lake Michigan salmon tournaments is that you don't need to be a seasoned professional to win. Once an angler knows the basics, all it takes is luck to have a trophy-sized fish take the bait.

Hotspots vary widely on Lake Michigan. Many anglers visit online message boards or call a fishing hotline, lakeshore sport shop or friend to find out what's happening before heading out. Often, mid- to late-summer fishing means trolling a mix of flasher/fly, spoon and plug combos 50 to 100 feet down over 80 to 180 feet of water or more. You can monitor the general depths charter boats are fishing, and then work similar depths well away from the pack. Fish are widely scattered, and the best catches often come while working undisturbed or lightly fished water.

A LITTLE HISTORY
Forty years ago this spring, Wisconsin's first stocking of chinook salmon was made in Sturgeon Bay's Strawberry Creek. With few exceptions, it's been a fruitful harvest ever since.

Fishery managers likely never envisioned the world-class salmon action enjoyed today by thousands of residents and visitors spring through fall. After all, salmon -- cohos at Algoma in 1968, and chinooks a year later -- were originally planted not just to offer a shot at landing them, but in hopes of taking care of a smelly problem along lakeshore beaches.

Alewives, the baitfish of choice for salmon and trout, used to die by the millions each spring and summer and wash up on the beaches. It was a public relations nightmare and nuisance for lakeshore communities, with costly cleanup efforts the only option. Fast-forward four decades, and alewife numbers are precariously low. That prompted all four states surrounding Lake Michigan to cut chinook stocking by a combined 25 percent the past four springs in an effort to get prey fish numbers to rebound.

There were signs last year that the cuts may be helping. For the first time in several years, the average size of adult chinooks returning to the Strawberry Creek egg collection facility was up. While there were no 30-pound-plus giants seen, some of the healthiest specimens were in the 25-pound class, and 20-pounders weren't as uncommon as they had been the previous two seasons. Most of the returning fish averaged between 10 and 20 pounds.