Grant Park Salmon and Steelhead Report : October

I arrived at grant park last Friday after 3 hours of driving and scouting other locations.

As you can see Oak Creek had just jumped some 400% and the mouth was gushing (we got there on the night of October 2nd). A friend (Mike) and I had high hopes as we strung up our casting rods. While I busied myself tying on a duo-lock snap my friend took his first cast. On his second he suddenly swung his rod high. Fish on.

We knew the night was going to be good.

From there on out we swung cranks, alone at the mouth of the river. Fish were landed. In fact, we hit a fish on about 10% of our casts. If we didn't land the fish, it spit the hook or the line broke. We also had many hits that no hook connected with the gums of those Salmon.

Top producers were Rapala X-Raps, Rapala Husky Jerks, and Storm Thundersticks.

The highlights of the night included a soaked blackberry, as mike scrambled to land a fish for me. The best fish of the night was Mike's 10+ pound Steelhead, silver as could be.

We ended up pulling in 6 Chinook Salmon, and 2 Steelhead. We had what looked to be a Coho flop of at the beach. We also lost 3 or 4 other kings trying to grab them with no net. Oops.

We packed it up, took a young Steelhead to fillet as a thank you to Tyler, our friend in Milwaukee that lent us a couple of couches. We returned to Oak Creek in the morning, people were cathing coho, steelhead, and kings with regularity with spawn in the creek. We tried the mouth again with no luck. It was a very successful weekend, we didn't mind going home without any daytime fish.

Until next time, I'll see ya out there.