WHAT'S A SPLAKE? - Robert Gwizdz

Splake were first described scientifically in the 1880s, but in the 1960s, Ontario experimented with stocking them in Georgian Bay, where the lake trout fishery had collapsed, optimistic that the hybrids would reach sexual maturity before they ran afoul of the sea lamprey, which decimated the lake trout population. 

 

Mark Martin caught this splake while trolling in Copper Harbor.  

 

Mark Martin, who is best known as a professional walleye fisherman—but truth he told he’s a pretty darn good all-around angler—was standing on the front deck of his Lund, when he stopped fishing for a half second and turned toward me.

“You know how people say, ‘You should have been here yesterday,’ ” he asked. “Well, this is yesterday.”

Yes it was. We were enjoying one of the most outstanding fishing experiences I’ve ever had in my life and it showed no signs of letting up. I mean, we were cracking up it was so much fun. And it happened out of the blue. We’d gone to Copper Harbor in pursuit of splake, the laboratory products of a male brook trout/female lake trout crossing. The cross was first made on the East Coast of the United States in the late 1800s, but failed to capture fisheries managers’ imaginations until Canadian fisheries biologists planted some in British Columbia to jumpstart a failing lake trout fishery. Like many hybrids, splake show rapid growth; they grow faster than purebred lake trout and much larger than typical brook trout. But unlike many hybrids, splake are reproductively viable, though the popular literature says it rarely happens naturally and has only been documented in a handful of lakes in Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario.

Splake—the name derives from marrying speckled trout (a common brook trout nickname) with lake trout—often produce outstanding fisheries in the vicinity of where they’re stocked. They are thought to be homebodies, though I have caught them many, many miles from their stocking locations. And they are by no means universally loved in the fish management community. Many biologists dislike them as they have the potential to back cross with their parent species; attempts to reinvigorate the coaster brook trout populations in the Great Lakes, for instance, could be jeopardized if the coasters are out there spawning with hybrids instead of their own. And they may be more aggressive and better able to compete for limited resources—they start eating fish at an earlier age than brook trout, for instance—than the purebreds. (That so-called hybrid vigor, remember.)

  

   

  

  

But I digress. I’ve been fishing for splake with Martin for a number of years, generally in late October, and always within the confines of Copper Harbor, though we have stuck our nose out into the big lake on occasion, but never with any success. We either troll or cast (and sometimes a little of both), mostly with minnow baits (Rapalas or Thundersticks) though swim baits and spoons will work, too, and the locals often fish for them with bobbers and spawn or minnows or even sometimes on the bottom.

We started out trolling for them this day despite seemingly negative environmental conditions. The water in Copper Harbor is typically so clear you can read the date on a dime a dozen feet down. But Lake Superior had been ornery for several days prior to our arrival and the water had more color to it than seemed ideal. Still, we started fishing with Rapalas (Eskos, models that are made for the European market that Martin swears by). We caught a 17-incher—they must be 15 inches to keep; at one time you were allowed to keep smaller specimens—but the regulation was changed because they are often so similar in appearance to lakers that it was feared anglers would keep small lakers thinking they had splake—almost immediately, and over the course of the first hour, we caught nine more. The problem? None would of the other eight would measure. They ranged from about nine inches to 14 and change; they would have been dandy brookies if they didn’t have that lake trout gene in them.

So Martin suggested we go out in Lake Superior—it was an unusually calm day for autumn in the northern Upper Peninsula—and see if we could improve the size structure of our catch. We did. And an hour of trolling on the big lake produced... absolutely nada.

  

  

And that’s when Martin had a brain storm. He’d caught them on jigging Rapalas through the ice before on Superior, he told me, so he piloted his boat into a cove where there was pea gravel on the bank, where he thought they’d be spawning—or at least going through the motions—and lo and behold, the depth finder lit up like a Christmas tree. We dropped our jigging baits over the side of the boat in about 20 feet of water, and, wham, we both hooked up immediately.

Martin lost his fish when it straightened out the treble hook. I hauled mine—about five pounds, one of the better splake I’d ever caught—upside the boat and steered it into the net, which was a feat in itself as it was pulling like a tractor and gyrating like a saddle bronc.

While Martin retied a new bait, I caught another. And I hooked a third, which broke me off on the hook set.

So while I was retying, Martin started catching them. And before you know it we were throwing fish back, putting the fish that looked like males in the live well, letting the females go. Still, we had our six keepers in no time.

So we left, right? Get out of here. We stayed and played CPR (catch, photograph, and release) for another hour or so, catching a trophy-caliber fish on almost every drop.

  

   

   

   

And what fish these were! Big trout. There was a fair degree of variance in their appearance; some looked more like lake trout, with a more forked tails, less spectacular coloring, and plentiful vermiculation on their backs. Others looked more like brookies with squarer tails, gorgeous spots and orange bellies. But almost all of them had that distinctive look of spawning brook trout—bright orange pectoral fins with a white leading edge—that practically demanded you take them to a taxidermist.

We stayed on them and caught them until the daylight started to fade; we hadn’t started until up in the afternoon as we’d spent the morning taking down a ladder stand that Martin had been (successfully) bear hunting out of this fall. I wanted to try to get some set-up photos of the fish while we still had light, so, although it pains me to admit it, we left them biting. We probably caught about 40.

My guess is the dark water was the key; they probably would have spooked out of there if it was typically gin clear Lake Superior water in that shallow depth. Fact is, I was surprised they didn’t all spook out there anyway because of the ruckus they caused as they fought our relatively light spinning tackle.

 

Mark Martin shows off a Lake Superior splake.

  

It was the first time I’d caught splake from Lake Superior, where the lake trout population is healthy and the fish grow as long as your leg. But I’ve run into them in the past elsewhere. At one time there was a healthy splake fishery on Little Bay de Noc, where the Michigan Department of Natural Resources maintained them with an annual stocking program. You’d occasionally catch them while walleye fishing, generally by jigging a spoon tipped with a minnow (or half minnow) on the bottom. That fishery played out when a new district biologist, who didn’t like splake—more on that later—decided to stock brown trout instead. Given the way brown trout have done in the Michigan waters of Lake Michigan in recent years (i.e. not well) I wonder if he ever second guessed that decision. Probably not.

Similarly, I’ve caught them in the Cedar River, a major tributary to Lake Michigan in the Upper Peninsula while fishing for steelhead or salmon with spinners. My best day I caught three, including a very nice one that inhaled my No. 5 Mepps-style spinner. And I caught them many miles upstream from the lake. Clearly there were heading upstream through some innate biological imperative.

But for the most part, my splake fishing has been limited to Copper Harbor, where I make an annual pilgrimage—it’s a full day’s drive from where I live—each fall because the fishing is just that good. It’s the only place that I’m aware of that the Michigan DNR still stocks splake in Great Lakes waters—Ontario may still be fooling with them, I don’t know—though the DNR does put them in some of the inland trout lakes in northern Michigan. They are faster growing than either of their contributing parents (Is that the right way to refer to fish that are stripped of their spawning products and fertilized in a bucket and raised in a hatchery?) and they grow significantly larger than most brook trout. Splake can be expected to reach 18 inches by two years of age, a couple of inches longer than lakers of the same age and nearly twice as long as purebred brook trout. They’ve been known to reach 20 pounds, though a fish less than half that size would be considered the splake of a career by almost any angler.

   

    

   

    

Splake are said to be easier to catch than either of the purebreds they come from, but I question that as lakers and brookies are often easy enough to come by.

Splake were first described scientifically in the 1880s, but in the 1960s, Ontario experimented with stocking them in Georgian Bay, where the lake trout fishery had collapsed, optimistic that the hybrids would reach sexual maturity before they ran afoul of the sea lamprey, which decimated the lake trout population. But splake exhibit low fecundity and the Lake Huron experiment failed to bear fruit.

These days splake are considered a put-grow-and-take fishery and are dependent on stocking programs to continue. That has some splake aficionadas concerned as the hybrids have their fair share of detractors. Because of their hybrid vigor, some biologists figure they can outcompete native species and with all the attention coaster brook trout are getting, many of them would just as soon abandon the stocking program and remove that possible hurdle from the coaster rehabilitation effort.

But the current Lake Superior Basin Coordinator with the Michigan DNR is not as concerned as some, so I expect the Copper Harbor stockings to continue for the foreseeable future. And I for one am grateful as I already have plans to fish for splake again this fall. And I hope to continue to do so as long as I can.

 

 

MORE GREAT ARTICLES FROM AMATO MEDIA

TRACKING ICE-BOIUND BROWNS - MATT STRAW

 

TRANSITION STEELHEAD - BRIAN KELLY