DULUTH – Connor Suliin reached for a brass bell as soon as he iced the first fish caught on a recent troll through the southernmost waters near the North Shore.
"Kala, Kala, Kala!" the first mate said as he rang the charter boat's good luck charm.
In the language of his Finnish ancestors, the 15-year-old deckhand was saying, "Fish, fish, fish."
The salmon and trout foraging for food in the top five feet of water heeded his call.
On a recent sun-splashed Thursday afternoon, three of us reeled in nine coho salmon, two lake trout and one wild steelhead — an above-average catch from a thriving resource that's like a cherry on top of Minnesota's fishing scene.
To borrow the pet phrase of a charter boat captain from nearby Superior, Wis., it's as easy and sweet as picking cotton candy.
Lake Superior Area Fisheries Supervisor Cory Goldsworthy said North Shore coho salmon, in particular, might be at the top of their cycle this summer in terms of catch rates. Together with Superior's healthy lake trout population and smaller pockets of chinook, or king, salmon, and a few brown trout, anglers fishing this year in the Minnesota waters of Lake Superior are expected to catch some 40,000 trout and salmon. About a third of those will be caught aboard charter boats.
"The number of licensed charter boat captains [49 this year] is fairly steady," Goldsworthy said.