In the mid-1970s, at the height of the salmon craze in the Great Lakes, big brown trout began stealing some of the thunder.

In four years, from 1973 to 1976, four state-record browns were caught, ranging in weight from 23-pounds, 12-ounces, to 31-pounds, 8-ounces. Another record was set in 1984 with a 34-pound, 6-ounce trout.

While those fish were caught from a variety of locations in or adjacent to the Great Lakes, a notable percentage came from northern Lake Michigan counties like Mason, Benzie, and Manistee. The fishing was so good in the waters off Ludington, Manistee, and Frankfort that many anglers were sure one of those ports would be the home of the next world-record brown.

In recent seasons, with the salmon catch down, much of the furor over trout has died. Yet fishing for brown trout can still be very good in northern Lake Michigan. Virtually all of the browns that received Master Angler Awards in recent years have been caught from Lake Michigan, most from the Mason, Manistee, Benzie, Leelanau, and Grand Traverse waters of the lake. While those 16- to 24-pound trout were taken year-around, from spring through summer and even through the ice in February, a disproportionate number were caught in April, when the browns were in the shallows, gorging on smelt.

It's no secret that brown trout love smelt. Great Lakes trollers have long been accustomed to finding browns in 8-15 feet of water in April and May, and frequently catch them on shallow-running Rapalas, Rebels, and other smelt-shaped lures trolled on long lines.

What is less well known is that browns will travel into water as shallow as two or three feet deep in their pursuit of smelt, and can be caught by anglers standing on shore. Pier fishing for browns has always been productive in early spring, when the trout have followed schools of smelt into the mouth areas of rivers like the Manistee and Betsie. But brown trout are the spookiest of the trout in the Great Lakes and the commotion of a busy river mouth can easily put them off the feed and send them streaking for the safety of deeper water. That is why early morning has traditionally been the hot time to fish off Lake Michigan piers and river mouths. Once boats start crisscrossing the area the fishing falls off.

The obvious solution to the problem of too much traffic is to find places where smelt congregate and fishermen don't. Look at any detailed map of the Lake Michigan shoreline and you'll immediately spot dozens of those places. In northern Mason County, a traditional brown-trout hotspot, those places have names like Porter Creek, Cooper Creek, and Gurney Creek. In fact, pick any of the hundreds of small streams that empty into the lake and you're likely to find it hosting at least a modest run of smelt in April. And if the smelt are there, the browns will be there also.

Brown trout often cruise incredibly close to shore in their pursuit of smelt and other baitfish. I once watched my cousin, Jeff Blough, cast laterally down the shoreline--he was standing on the beach, only the boots of his waders lapped by waves--toward a trout he saw swirl in the shallows. His lure landed no more than three feet offshore, in less than two feet of water, and he immediately hooked a six-pound brown. Other times we've had trout slam our lures virtually at the ends of our rods, in that half-second before the lure would have been lifted from the water for another cast.

If the shoreline area is undisturbed, and especially if it is an overcast day, smelt and trout will sometimes stay in the shallows all day. More often, however, the action picks up starting about an hour before sunset. The internal clock that motivates the smelt pushes them shoreward at that time, causing them to school up in the shallows to get ready for their upstream spawning run. Browns will attack then, slicing through the smelt with so much speed they'll often erupt from the water. Such surface disturbances are the best indication of feeding fish. On calm days it's possible to see the swirls a half-mile down the shoreline, though if the wind is up you have to watch much more closely to notice anything unusual on the surface.

An accurate representation of a smelt should logically be the best lure for shallow-water browns--and probably would be if light, balsa-bodied lures cast well into the wind. Calm days are unfortunately rare on the east shore of Lake Michigan, where prevailing winds have met no obstacles for the 50 miles they've crossed the open lake. Small, heavy spoons like Little Cleos and Crocodiles are probably the best choice in the wind. You'll have to experiment with colors. Some anglers use nothing but chartreuse or green, others insist on blue, and still others cast only orange or red. In my experience, color seems less important than lure action, though you might want to consider the old axiom of using bright colors on bright days and dark colors on dark days.

Plenty of fish are caught from the beach simply by chucking and retrieving. I've seen them hooked almost the moment the lure landed, as if they were waiting under it with their mouths open, and other times while the lure settled toward bottom or was being retrieved at break-neck speed just under the surface.

But spoons seem most effective if they're activated almost as if they were jigs. Jeff Blough showed me how he does it: casting out (or down the length of the shoreline), letting his lure sink to bottom, raising his rod tip to lift the lure, dropping the rod, reeling in slack, and raising the rod again to activate the lure. The spoon flutters forward and up, drifts down, bumps bottom, flutters forward and up again, drifts down, bumps bottom--much the way a stunned baitfish swims.

Trout sometimes grab the lure as it descends, but more often they strike on the lift. At such times the strike is unforgettable: they smash the lure, as if intending to kill it on impact. When that happens near shore, say 10 feet off the end of your rod, you can easily overreact, setting the hook so hard you break your line.

Theoretically, shoreline fishing for brown trout should be best at night, while smelt are massing at stream mouths. One angler I talked to says he went to the beach one night after the smelt run had ended and the area was deserted and quiet. His first cast with a large Bomber was struck by something enormous that ran straight for Wisconsin, peeling hundreds of feet of line off his reel. It broke his line far out in the lake. Convinced it was a large brown, he has been haunting the shorelines at night ever since.

These days, browns in Lake Michigan run in the six- to 16-pound class, with occasional larger ones, and success tends to be very good or very bad. There seems to be a correlation between line diameter and number of strikes. Lake browns, like brown trout anywhere, tend to be leader-shy. The problem is that using four- or six-pound-test line--while increasing the number of strikes--makes it difficult to land a 20-pounder in shallow water, where rocks and other obstructions often reach out to snag the line. A good drag and an abundant supply of line are prerequisites. A long rod also helps absorb the shock of a fighting fish and takes the strain off light line.

Smelt runs are notoriously undependable, so it's reasonable to expect brown trout that follow the runs to be just as unreliable. Sometimes browns show up in the shallows two weeks before you see any sign of smelt. Other years you won't see a single trout until the smelt have been running for two or three nights.

One moonlit night I stood waist-deep off the mouth of the Crystal River, surrounded by smelt, and witnessed dozens of large trout streaking through the shallows around me. In the faint light they were nothing more than shadows, more visible at the peripheries of my vision than straight on. Every cast of my Rapala I was convinced it would be nailed by something large and rocket-fast that would leap once then tear off on those thumping long runs browns are famous for.

Smelt dippers in the river behind me were shouting in triumph. I could turn my head and see them, outlined by halos of lantern light, lifting their nets and carefully funneling the squirming smelt into buckets. I cast and cast, until the smelt were gone, long after it was obvious the trout were gone too. I should have quit early and saved my dignity. Instead I went home wet, chilled, and too excited to sleep. Browns have a way of doing that to you.