Porch Notes
Saginaw Bay's walleye: a comeback for the record books
Outdoors
If you live anywhere along Saginaw Bay, you live next to one of the great fish-recovery stories in America. The bay’s walleye fishery collapsed in the mid-1900s after decades of overfishing and habitat loss. Starting in the early 1980s the state rebuilt it fingerling by fingerling, and then nature lent a hand: when the invasive alewife crashed in Lake Huron around 2003, baby walleye suddenly thrived. The DNR stopped stocking entirely in 2006 because the fish no longer needed the help, declared the recovery complete in 2009, and by 2023 biologists estimated more than ten million adult walleye in the Saginaw Bay stock — enough that the state raised the daily catch limit.
Today the bay is routinely named among the best walleye water in the country. Charters run out of Bay City, Linwood, and Pinconning all season; in spring the fish surge up the Saginaw and Tittabawassee rivers past half the towns in the valley; and in winter the ice-fishing villages reappear off the shore like small towns of their own. It’s a genuine, everyday perk of living here — world-class fishing at the end of the street.
Where to see it
Launches and charters all along the bay shore — Bay City, Essexville, Linwood, and Pinconning on the west side, with the spring run up the Saginaw and Tittabawassee rivers.