Confirm this at the risk of dating yourself, but do you remember when Lake Ontario went from being a punch line to a world class fishery?

For considerably more than half of the 20th Century the big lake was a receptacle for all manner of industrial and residential contaminents from surrounding states, Canada and the western lakes in the Great chain. The smallest of the Great Lakes, Lake Ontario was a virtual toxic cesspool from Buffalo to FairHaven, from Canada to Sodus.

An historic cleanup effort ensued, which brought it back to useful status and the state (and Canada) began stocking first Pacific, then Atlantic salmon and steelheads.

Certainly, there have been ups and downs for the lake as a salmonid fishery, which you’ll find that in any stocked water. It is generally agreed that the salmon fishery reached its zenith in 1989.

But after a precipitous plunge in fishery quality due to a decline in forage fish, complications caused by invasive species and a floundering economy that limited fishing visits, the fishery has apparently rebounded.

A study initiated last September and scheduled to run through April is part of a protracted effort (similar surveys have been taken over the years) to monitor the Lake Ontario tributary fishery during the salmon and steelhead runs.

Although it will likely take at least until autumn for the survey to be completed, analyzed and its findings published, the figures for the critical Sept. 1-Nov. 30 salmon run time frame show a remarkable resurgence, particularly in the eastern basin.

In fact, angler hours on the tributaries in that span nearly outstripped the numbers achieved on the whole lake all year.

Of the 21 tributaries studied in the first two months of autumn, the Salmon River claimed 751,127 angler hours – more than half of the angling time (1,111,362 hours) recorded for all of the Lake’s tributaries.

In that period, 85,106 chinook salmon (68 percent of the survey’s total) and 29,113 coho salmon (95 percent of the total) were landed.

The report shows that more than half the chinooks and two-thirds of the cohos were released.

Anglers also reported fishing roughly 49,482 hours in the Oswego River in the same span, putting it behind only the Salmon River and Eighteen Mile Creek). Approximately 4,088 chinooks were landed from the Oswego River; 2,876 were released.

In mid-autumn, steelhead enter the tributaries in the wake of spawning salmon to feed on the eggs. The Salmon River provided the greatest number of steelhead (39,697), and the Oswego River placed fifth with 1,227.

Brown trout stage their spawning runs upstream from mid-October through December. The Salmon and Oswego Rivers placed fourth (3,523) and sixth (2,930) place, respectively, on the brown trout list.