Back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, I fished Lake Michigan salmon nearly every week throughout the summer.

That wasn’t long after salmon were introduced into the Great Lakes and the fishing was awesome.

The king, or chinook, salmon were hogs running 20 to 30 pounds plus and would make sizzling runs that threatened to empty the reel spool.

The rod would buck and throb as the powerful, head- shaking kings gave your arms a workout you wouldn’t soon forget.

That all came to an end when I took a job as game warden in Washington state.

Even though I’ve long been back in Michigan, I hadn’t fished salmon out in the lake since.

Last week I was tickled to death when a friend of my son invited him and me to go out after salmon.

It was the good old days all over as we slowly motored down the St. Joe River, cleared the piers and made the run to deep water where the mighty kings ruled.

My son took on the first fish, but something was drastically wrong.

There was no long, smoking run, no rod-pounding battle.

He was just cranking it in like a waterlogged boot.

This could not possibly be a king. But by golly, it was. Just a little guy of 12 pounds or so, but the captain was ecstatic.

“Wow!” he exclaimed. “Nice fish.  One of the bigger ones I’ve caught this year.”

I was dumfounded.

I took on the next, and only other fish of the day, and the fight was even more lackluster.

It weighed about seven pounds. About average, the captain said. What in the world has happened to our regal king?

In nosing around, it appears the salmon are starving to death.

Back when I was fishing them, alewife populations in the Great Lakes were of epic proportions.

The salmon gorged themselves day and night and quickly grew huge and powerful.

But over the ensuing years the alewives were diminishing and the average size of kings followed suit.

Then in the late 1980s a bacterial kidney disease caused the king population in Lake Michigan to crash.

As drastic as that was, those that survived were once again heavily tipping the scales, suggesting there’s a limit to how many salmon the Great Lakes can support.

Alewives are pretty much the sole food source for Great Lakes salmon.

However, alewife numbers are now a bare skeleton of what they once were.

Besides alewives being relentlessly consumed by salmon, the recent invaders, gobies and zebra and quagga mussels, are out competing the alewives for food.

The amount of salmon being planted into the Great Lakes has been significantly reduced to compensate for the lack of alewives. but if kings are only averaging seven or eight pounds it’s obvious things are severely out of balance.

On the West Coast, the home waters of the kings, they still average  more than 20 pounds with 40-pounders not uncommon.

And why are they so feeble? I mean, embarrassingly, decrepitly feeble. Here I can only speculate.

After catching coho salmon in Alaska that put up some of the most spectacular battles I’d ever seen, I checked out Michigan’s coho. They were a far cry from the Alaskan version.

Hatchery personnel told me the DNR never changed the original gene pool from back in the 1960s and they were so inbred they could barely swim.

Might this now be taking place with kings?

Michigan DNR has long been severely strapped for money and it gets worse every year.

I found some figures showing that the average state invests $15 per acre of water in fisheries management.

Michigan is investing less than a dollar per acre (to be fair, we have far more water than any other state).

How long has it been since new blood has been added to the king’s gene pool? I don’t know.

Considering the millions of dollars and untold amount of jobs salmon bring into our economy, I would hope their well-being is high on our priority list.

It would be economically foolish to willingly transform our king into a lowly pawn.

Carpe diem.

Larry Lyons writes a weekly outdoor column for Leader Publications.

He can be reached at larrylyons@verizon.net.