Bordered on three sides by Lake Michigan and containing two of the state’s most productive inland lakes, Leelanau County offers boundless fishing opportunities for anglers. Many of those opportunities are made possible by fish plantings by the MDNR, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency and the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.
The Enterprise had an opportunity last week to discuss fish planting efforts past and future with state fisheries biologist Heather Hettinger, who also spoke on funding shortfalls for the Fisheries Division. Alan Campbell posed a series of questions to Hettinger.
Enterprise: Fisheries Division chief Randy Claramunt delivered a stark financial report on Feb. 13 to the Michigan Natural Resources Commission, explaining that fishing license fees fall short of covering everyday expenses. Consequently, long-term infrastructure maintenance and replacement for items such as state-owned dams and fish rearing station equipment are being neglected. As someone in the front line of fisheries management, what are your thoughts?
Hettinger: We are in a bad way financially. License revenue just does not keep up with inflation like other recreational (revenues) do. Unfortunately license sales are the only stream of funding right now for MDNR Fish and Wildlife divisions. No tax dollars come into our budgets, which I think a lot of people do not realize.
One very large hit for us was that there were some mergers and closures in companies that produce fish food products in the U.S. that our hatcheries buy to feed fish, which resulted in the cost of fish food doubling per bag in 2024. What was an expensive but manageable cost two years ago, became difficult very quickly. We are looking at some cuts. If things continue on this trend we may have to halt production on some of our more expensive fish stocking programs until a solution is found. We are trying not to make any cuts to our lake and stream surveys as that monitoring is really important and doesn’t get done frequently enough as it is.
Enterprise: Switching to plants for inland lakes, the number of lake trout fingerlings, from 5-6 inches, was reduced from 14,200 in 2023 to 8,200 last spring in Glen Lake. Why the reduction?
Hettinger: Lake trout are a little more disease prone in our hatchery system than most of our other species. The Marquette Hatchery often reduces the number of fish being reared to keep them happy and healthy, so our inland lake trout stockings have some variability in the numbers from time to time.
Enterprise: Staying with Glen Lake, about 63,500 rainbows of 6-8 inches were planted in 2023 but only 22,000 were released in 2024. The plantings from two years ago included a drop of nearly 45,000 in October.
Hettinger: The fall fish are bonus fish, not to be expected every year.
Enterprise: How long will it take for those rainbows to become legal to keep?
Hettinger: Usually by about their third summer in the lake, It depends on growth rates, but our growth rates in Glen are typically pretty good. They may become legal size faster than that, but they often don’t show up in the catch until after that third year.
Enterprise: In general, what have you heard about fishing in Glen Lake?
Hettinger: I haven’t heard a ton in the past couple of weeks-I had some decent reports on perch at first ice on Big, a few pike over in Little Glen. I bumped into a couple of fellas coming off the ice two weeks ago that had a couple of nice trout. They said it’s been slow but not disappointing.
Enterprise: Are there plans to survey Glen Lake to get a scientifi c look at how fish populations
are doing?
Hettinger: I am hoping to get back into Glen/Little Glen/ Fisher in 2027 to repeat our last large netting and electrofishing survey effort, which was done in 2009.
Enterprise: Even with Bruce Price gone — he lobbied you often on the benefits of maintaining the lake trout population in Lake Leelanau — you’re continuing plants. Wasn’t the MDNR considering cutting back because of a lack of successful reports?
Hettinger: We were, but I had some really good conversations with Greg Alsip and a couple other more avid anglers and we came up with a couple new stocking locations to try to get better survival. We moved those fish over to Nedows Beach, and anecdotally I am getting reports of better numbers of fish, and smaller fish, being caught by anglers. That access to closer, deeper water I think has helped those little fish better avoid predators. I know Bruce and his crew really liked helping herd those fish out from (Houdek’s) creek mouth, but it just wasn’t the best site to be stocking those fish for survival.
Enterprise: In 2024, state records show the federal government did not plant lake trout in Lake Michigan waters off the county. That was quite a pullback considering that in 2023 more than 200,000 lakers averaging nearly six inches were planted on Good Harbor and Lees reefs as well as off Ingals Point. Is there a thought that lake trout are becoming self-populating, so feds can cut back a bit on plants?
Hettinger: There were lake trout stocked by the USFWS (United States Fish and Wildlife Service) in Lake Michigan during 2024. It appears that they do not have the entries logged into their database, and thus we do not have their entries in our database. We see less natural reproduction in the north end of Lake Michigan; most of the wild fish seem to be occurring down south. Given state and tribal fishing interests up here there are no plans on cutting back any further at this point. Some reductions have been made in the past 10 years or so, but right now things are on track.
Enterprise: Walleye plants in West Grand Traverse Bay stood at 142,000 in Suttons Bay and Northport in 2023, but only 33,230 walleye were planted in 2024 — all in Northport. Fish were less than two inches in length. The ’23 plants were labeled as a state/tribal “coop plant” effort; last year they were termed simply “tribal,” as in facilitated solely by the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. Was there a difference?
Hettinger: Never heard the plants described as such before. They were strictly Tribal in 2024 with everything going to Northport. Going back to 1998, the tribal walleye plants have always been in Northport or Suttons Bay; most years it’s both. How they are listed depends on who is doing the data entry — it has been mixed all the way back to 2008 … The numbers are always discussed with our Tribal Coordination Unit, so we know what’s going on, but tribal Natural Resources staff do the fish rearing and stocking.
Enterprise: Offshore of Leelanau, Lake Michigan brown trout are only planted near Glen Arbor and Empire. About 18,000 were planted last year in the Crystal River; another 930 went in at Empire. How do those numbers compare with previous years?
Hettinger: We have reduced the number of brown trout stocked at all of the stocking sites in Lake Michigan over the years. They are lesser performing to the fishery, and anglers want more chinook. In order to stock more chinook we have to reduce other species. We can only stock a certain number of alewife predator fish in the lake each year under our Predator Cap. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of give and take to give anglers what they want without crashing the alewife base. The brown trout actually go in the (Crystal) River up at Overbrook Drive, which gives the fish some time to acclimate in the stream before they head out to the big lake.
Enterprise: Lake Michigan salmon fishing here relies on plants in nearby rivers and natural reproduction. What’s planned for the future?
Hettinger: Salmon stocking is pretty steady. Boardman River and Medusa Creek (in Charlevoix County) are every other year stocking sites for chinook. The Boardman and Medusa are now stocked in even years, with the next stocking up 2026. Coho stocking is stable on the Platte, and starting in 2025 all the coho will be mass marked — they will have a Coded Wire Tag in their snouts and be marked with an adipose fin clip. It’s really going to be important for anglers to collect those heads, freeze them and include a slip of paper with the necessary information or fill out a form named CODED WIRE TAG RECOVERY to save them for us. They can call me and I will come get them, or they can turn them over to our Leelanau County creel clerk Bre Abercrombie when she is checking anglers at Fishtown, Northport, or Suttons Bay this year.
Enterprise: What’s your prognosis for salmon fishing this year?
Hettinger: I am anticipating that salmon fishing will be good this summer, maybe not quite as good as last year, based on what we saw with survival. I think there will be less adults around this year, but good numbers of what we call one- and two-year-old fish. Our fish-aging schematic uses ages 0-3 for chinook; anglers use 1-4 and (differentiate between) two- and three-year old fish.
Enterprise: Are any major changes in stocking or Leelanau fisheries anticipated in 2025?
Hettinger: Status quo in Leelanau.
