Another rearing season is underway. We have about 120,000 Salmon eggs incubating in the hatchery. First eggs came in on 10th October and the last eggs came in on 23 October.

Hatchery Phone: 519-389-4474

The Lake Huron Fishing Club Trout Hatchery is located on Huron Terrace in the town of Kincardine across from the Harbour.  This fish hatchery was built in 1992 and began raising fish in 1993. 

The hatchery produces 2 species of sport fish, brown trout and rainbow trout for stocking into Lake Huron waters.  120,000 yearling trout are released annually into Lake Huron waters and tributaries.  All operations at the hatchery are by volunteers from the Kincardine community.  Click here or on the link to the upper left to learn more about our Trout Hatchery operations.

To request tours or obtain additional information please contact our Trout Hatchery Manager Al Wilkins @ fisheye@bmts.com

Hatchery Phone: 519-396-5833

By Jeff Gillies, jeffgillies@gmail.com Great Lakes Echo Sept. 2, 2009

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories about the challenges of managing non-native fish in the Great Lakes.

Fishery managers have made little progress in restoring lake trout, the Great Lakes’ dominant predator until the species collapsed in the 1940s and 1950s.

Most of them agree that alewives, a non-native fish, are a big part of the problem. They invaded the lakes from the Atlantic Ocean after the Welland Canal opened in 1932. Alewives eat young lake trout and disrupt chemical processes important to their reproduction.

But biologists don’t plan on getting rid of them now that they’re here. Instead, Lake Michigan managers recently launched fish stocking strategies that protect alewives.

What’s going on?

Invasive species are usually the target of disdain and eradication programs. But alewives get a pass because they’re the main food source for two other non-native species - the chinook and coho salmon. And those salmon are cornerstones of a multi-billion dollar Great Lakes fishery.

Though states imported salmon to control alewives, management plans now serve to keep enough alewives around to keep salmon healthy and abundant.

And as long as state agencies aim to keep available lots of alewives for salmon to eat, lake trout rehabilitation is impossible, said Mark Ebener, an assessment biologist with the Chippewa Ottawa Resources Authority, a regulatory agency representing five Michigan Indian tribes.

Other experts disagree.

Great Lakes fisheries managers have no plans to abandon the profitable salmon fishery, said Marc Gaden, spokesperson for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.

“There’s no inherent contradiction between managing for the native fishery, and also stocking fish for recreational purposes,” he said. “There is definitely a balance that needs to occur.”

Until the mid 1900s, lake trout were the top predators in every Great Lake but Erie. They supported tribal and commercial fisheries. But a slew of factors drove them nearly extinct in all of the lakes but Superior.

Between overfishing and the invasion of the parasitic sea lamprey that feasted on the fish, the Great Lakes’ annual lake trout harvest plummeted from 15 million pounds to 300,000 pounds by the 1960s.

Great Lakes fishery managers have tried to restore lake trout through sea lamprey control and planting young fish. That’s only worked in Lake Superior where a small lake trout population remained after the species’ basin-wide collapse.

Some researchers think lake trout restoration hasn’t worked because fisheries managers have stocked the wrong age fish in the wrong places at the wrong times.

Others, like Ebener, say the biggest problem is the 6-inch alewife. They exploded by the 1950s and 1960s because there weren’t enough lake trout left to control them. They crowded out native species like white fish and perch, and were prone to huge die-offs that would cover beaches with rotting fish.

In the 1960s, Michigan managers hatched a plan to control alewives by stocking the Great Lakes with chinook and coho salmon, both native to the Pacific Ocean. The salmon would sit in for lake trout at the top of the food chain and draw recreational anglers looking for a fish that fights.

The plan worked, driving down alewives and creating a world-class salmon fishery better than it was in the Pacific where those fish were from, Ebener said.

That built new interest in fishing for other species. Recreational fishing on the Great Lakes was miniscule before the 1960s, Dexter said. There was no Clean Water Act to keep people and industries from freely polluting the lakes, and anglers were happy to stay inland.

“People just didn’t go out there because the lakes were a dumping ground for everybody,” Dexter said. “It was putrid out there.”

But Great Lakes sport fishing grew, bringing a financial boom to sleepy towns that built local economies catering to recreational anglers.

“From guys selling boats to people selling bait to people renting motels, that whole economy developed around salmon,” Ebener said.

Some sports fishermen are worried that state agencies a bias for native species and will pull the plug on salmon, said Dan Thomas, president of the Great Lakes Sports Fishing Council.

“We didn’t create this fishery, they did,” Thomas said. “Now they would take it away from the sportsmen, and the multi-billion dollar economy that it has created,” he said.

Part Two: Alewives: The trouble they cause and the salmon that love them.

The 2009 Derby Committee held their final meeting on September 08, 2009 and is pleased to declare this year’s Derby a resounding success.

Despite very trying economic conditions and poor weather, our results showed increased ticket sales & total entrants and higher income from all our donor sources.

On April 29, 2009 the Lake Huron Fish Club stocked 200 + Rainbow Fingerlings from the Kincardine Trout Hatchery into the Town Pond behind the Chinook Hatchery in Port Elgin.