Thunder Bay River Lake Run — Salmon, Steelhead, Brown Trout

Peak run · Chinook salmon as of 1 October 2026

1.0 miles of run water on the Thunder Bay River, from Lake Huron up to Ninth Street Dam. 3 species run it, on windows curated from MDNR guidance.

Open this river in the app

The run corridor The mouth Ninth Street Dam — the run stops here The piers — 9%

The pale water is where chinook were holding on 2026-09-30 — 91% of the run was still out on Lake Huron, which this picture does not reach. That day's gauge and lake readings were measured. Drawn 1 October 2026, north up, and it is a map of the river rather than of the lake it runs from.

1.0corridor miles
1NHD reaches
3species that run
Lake Huronthe lake they come from

Thunder Bay River is the shortest run corridor on this map: 1.0 mile, a single NHD reach, and one zone. The Ninth Street Dam closes it — USACE NID MI00188 'Ninth Street', Eagle Creek Renewable Energies LLC, river or stream name 'Thunder Bay', source agency FERC — so everything drawn here is the pierheads and harbour mouth, river mile 0.0 to 1.03. There is no mouth zone, no lower river and no upstream water above the first holding water, because the dam sits inside the first mile.

Two of the three windows carry the estimator's dates rather than months; the dates are its statewide set. Steelhead run 1 Oct – 31 Dec with a peak of 15 Oct – 15 Dec; chinook run 15 Aug – 31 Oct, peaking 15 Aug – 15 Oct, thin and variable since Lake Huron's alewife collapsed in 2003-04. Pink salmon are carried only as August–September, heaviest in odd-numbered years.

The questions about this river

One page each, answered from the same records as this one.

What runs the Thunder Bay River

Each window is calendar guidance curated from the state's own run-timing prose, not a regulation and not an observation. The stage beside it is this site's reading of that window against 1 October 2026. This river is one of the sixteen the staging estimator models, so the window is shown in the estimator's dated form. Those dates are one statewide set, the same on all sixteen rivers, and no more river-specific than the months they restate — what the estimator adds here is the daily staging read, not a sharper calendar.

Chinook salmon — 15 Aug – 31 Oct peak 15 Aug – 15 Oct Peak run. Thin and variable; peak September. Lake Huron's alewife collapsed in 2003-04 and the chinook fishery went with it. Carried as a thin run rather than dropped, because fish still return to the stocked rivers — but a Huron chinook run is not a Lake Michigan one and this layer will not draw it as though it were.
Pink salmon — Aug–Sept Tail-off. Naturalised, and heaviest in odd-numbered years — the two-year life cycle is what makes the run alternate.
Steelhead — 1 Oct – 31 Dec peak 15 Oct – 15 Dec Staging, 1 day out. The run that carries these rivers now. Fall push from October, spring peak in April.

The ceiling

Ninth Street Dam is where the run stops. Everything above it is upstream of the fishery — a fish cannot pass it, so the water above holds resident trout and not run fish, whatever the calendar says.

USACE NID MI00188 'Ninth Street', Eagle Creek Renewable Energies LLC, River or Stream Name 'Thunder Bay', Source Agency FERC

The run water, mouth to ceiling

Zone	What it is	River miles
Pier	the pierheads and the harbour mouth	0.0–1.0

River miles from the harbour mouth, walked up the NHDPlus HR mainstem. Fish arrive at the bottom of this table and work up it as the river cools and rises.

Access

No state boating access site falls inside this corridor's box. That is the record saying nothing, not this page saying there is no way in — the public land layer on the live map is the better answer for a river fished from the bank.

Open the Thunder Bay River on the live map →

Regulations

Great Lakes tributary rules are their own rules: seasons, gear and possession on run water differ from the inland trout regulations, and they differ by river and often by reach. Michigan's regulation summary is here, and the state's own guide is the regulation.

Tackle

General guidance by species, not by river — there is no record of what a given river fishes best with, and a page that invented one would be worse than a page that says so.

Chinook salmon Spinning: a medium-heavy 8'6"–9' rod, 15–20 lb line, heavy spoons and crankbaits off the pier, skein or spawn under a float in the river.
Pink salmon Light spinning tackle is enough — a 6'6"–7' rod and 6–10 lb line. Small pink and orange spinners, spoons and flies.
Steelhead Float fishing: a long 10'6"–13' rod, 8–12 lb main line, spawn bags, beads or jigs under a slip float — the method that covers a run without wading it.

Nearby run rivers

The next corridors up and down this shore, nearest first.

The rest of the run

Open the lake-run map →Every run river, with where the fish are holding today.Or get BirdTrout on the App Store