Transcript
Salmon-a-Rama 2026: Fishing, Family, and Festival Fun
The Don Rosen Show · Fri Jul 10, 2026
All right, we're talking fish fest.
We're talking Salmonorama, which is used for a while.
There was called.
It was called something.
We're going to talk about that in a moment here.
And Josh Subcheck is here.
He is the president of Salmon Unlimited, which runs Salmonorama.
And he brought his daughter along today, who really does all the labor in the hard work.
That's right.
And Lily is here as well.
And so just just because it dawned on me just now, it was called something else for two years.
What was it called?
Big one.
The big one.
The big one.
Yeah.
Who decided that change should happen.
Don't know.
It was before me and the conversion back to Salmonorama is also before me.
That person was banished to Siberia and we're never going to be heard from again.
All right.
So Salmonorama starts actually tonight at midnight.
Well, the festival starts today, but the actual fishing festival in midnight.
Correct.
Yes.
How do you know people aren't cheating and starting at 11 o'clock?
That's a great question.
Yeah.
No, we do what we can on an honor system.
You have the fish police out there watching.
The community does share Intel.
So if we do have a suspicious activity, it is actually reported into us and we can investigate.
Yeah,
you snitches all over.
We've
got a
network.
So people think you could just fish right off the.
Racine area.
But actually, it's a whole great lake, right?
Correct.
It's all of Lake Michigan.
Lake Michigan.
And all of its tributaries up to the first bridge.
So in Racine, you can visibly fish the harbor up to the Main Street Bridge, same with Milwaukee with the Hone.
And so how far north can you go?
The entire Lake Michigan.
So Sturgeon Bay, we have a way station in Gladstone, Michigan in the UP.
We've got way stations in the Michigan side as well.
There's I think three or four different ports with way stations there down in Illinois and Winthrop Harbor.
We have really good because you don't have to come back here to get one of the beauties of our tournament is we have a longstanding member whose son is a software engineer.
He designed a full contest operating program that allows us to link all of our ports better than any of the other fishing tournaments out there for live.
inputs of all the fish so you can see live as fish come in where you stand in the rankings.
Oh, that's pretty neat.
Unlike the old days when you had to see the leaderboard, somebody riding a chalk.
Physical leaderboard, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And people rushing down to Racine on the final day to get that fish in before 11 a.m.
cut
off.
It's cool to watch it actively moving.
You can just stand there by the screen and watch.
the leaderboard update, and you can see the different pages, so it's not just a leaderboard, it's got subsections.
Now, give me a little history of salmon ceramics.
Not everybody knows the history.
Newcomers don't know.
All of a sudden they hear, what's a salmon, what?
Okay, so give me a little history of
it.
Yeah, you know, first of all, the salmon history, they were introduced back in the 60s on the Michigan side.
There was a passionate fisherman who had also a little bit of history in the
the DNR side and made a suggestion that we should bring in coho salmon to help control the alewife, the invasive alewives, that if you remember, they used to take a bulldozer to clean off the beaches every year.
After the alewives would go and spawn, they would die off and be a foot deep on the beach smelling up.
So they started with these coho, it went great, they added Chinook salmon, and our club was formed in 73 to focus on the fishery and water safety.
And in 74, another group in town, the Tuesday Optimus Club, formed Salmonorama as a festival and a fishing tournament just here in Racine.
And that, that event sprawled out into something massive.
I'm still trying to figure out who got the tank down there.
There was a great overhead picture taken from a prop plane, propeller plane, that had a tank sitting at the boat launch at Fifth Street down there.
I'd like to have one back if anyone has a connection.
one?
Yeah.
Yeah, we'd like to have that dropped off, but.
that sprawled out into a huge festival for the community.
And as the Tuesday Optimist Club waned out, Salmon Unlimited offered to step up and take over because we were concerned about keeping the fishing tournament going.
And we brought back the festival back in 2024 for its 50th anniversary.
It's our third year back and stronger than ever.
So this is where people get confused.
They hear Salmon Unlimited.
Yes.
And that's the organization that runs.
Correct.
Yes.
Now, what else do you do?
Is it just Salmonorama?
No, no, no.
Oh, I stepped
on
sacred ground here.
I'm sorry.
It's a wonderful question to ask because we're known for salmonorama.
They are parallel to each other when we're handing out flyers in the parade.
No one knows the name salmon unlimited, as you mentioned.
But salmon unlimited is the organization, the nonprofit behind it.
We do a lot of public outreach, community outreach grants to other community organizations, public safety.
We installed the life rings on the south pier for Racine County.
In fact, two days after we installed those, a few years back, a lady fell in the water and one was used to rescue her.
And it made the news out of Milwaukee.
You can still, if you Google it, you can still get the live interview where Jim's being interviewed after the fact, talking about it.
We installed a weather buoy, six and an eighth miles out that gives wave conditions, water temperature and everything.
So it helps with not only motor safety, but also shore safety.
If you're seeing waves coming out of the east, you should be extremely cautious about
swimming down at the lakefront because of the potential for under toes.
We give grants to everything from veterans outreach of Wisconsin to local domestic abuse centers, particularly the women's domestic abuse centers.
We've done kids for toys for tots, a lot of different grants programs we've issued at scholarships to individuals who have applied.
But this program, salmonorama, aside from being a wonderful fishing tournament that like for those that like to fish,
the proceeds of this event help fund all those outreach efforts that we do for our community.
Yeah, I don't think anybody knows that.
You're going to get the word out about that.
You know, we try, but what does everybody remember other than Sam and Arama?
Fish Fest.
Yes.
And that big fish you always see in the Fourth
of
July parade.
You know, you're going to love it.
When you walk in the South Gate at Festival Park this year, directly to the left is the big fish so you can get your photos with it.
Directly ahead of you is the kids fish pond where kids will be able to fish for brook trout and this year We've got special fish fish marked with tags.
So if you catch one of the five special ones you get a large prize We got the way station.
They're live fish.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, they're real 211 brook trout were dropped into the pool yesterday.
How big is this pool?
16 foot 42 inch high.
Okay.
Keep it about 40 or 38 inches deep
Okay, and Lily's in charge of that.
Yes, Lily and one of our good friends Anaya the two of them have been dedicated to running it since 24 since we brought it back
Yeah, see I told you before we're not I only went fishing once in my life and it was for Salmonorama Yeah, and they put me on the boat and I said well, I'm not gonna put the bait on you do it I put the line
and I can
only imagine what you're fishing for.
Oh,
yeah
with just a few minutes I caught a fish.
It was night size
And I said, put him back.
And I want him dead.
Just put him back.
And yeah, it was it was kind of neat to catch when they said, you got one.
I think there's a guy into the boat who hooked me up to it.
But they said, no,
you know, we all have a special story from Sam and Arama.
Lily and I think would agree that we took a young man out who is fishing the shore with his grandfather and camping the traditional style out on the break wall for the whole week.
And all they caught was one drum, a rough fish.
And so we took him out the next day and caught multiple fish.
It was a tough, wavy day.
He threw up over the side because of it, but he came back talking about his fish.
One of them later in the week turned out to be a coho salmon that was a little over 10 pounds and actually won cash for him, too.
Well, look at that.
I was back in 24 or 23.
Sorry, 23.
I don't
know the specific year.
I just know we had a lot of fun.
Yeah, it was before the big festival because we were still at the peninsula.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
Well, I've been seeing on the news lately that a lot of sharks are moving in
on the east coast of the United States.
And they showed a hammerhead shark.
I had never seen one other than a drawing or a photograph.
Sure.
But they actually showed one swimming around over there.
And I said, whoa, could you imagine running?
Those are really ugly fish.
Could you imagine running into one of those when you're
there?
There are two questions we get from kids.
Yeah, the kids one.
That's the number one question.
Are there sharks in the lake?
No,
it's not saltwater.
And it's easily
believable, though, when you realize, you know, most people think of a lake, they think of something out in Western Racine County, Browns Lake, Eagles Lake, you know, Silver Lake, those types of lakes.
Lake Michigan is 79 miles across to the nearest port of Michigan.
They're four ports.
And they claim once they were so frozen over, people were able to walk across the lake to Michigan.
That's what they claim.
Well, there's there's portions up north and down south where I could see that happen.
Yeah.
And in severe enough weather and we've had ice sounds pretty deep out onto the lake in the years I've lived in Racine.
So I wouldn't be surprised if portions of it might have had that.
But.
You're not going to see anyone do that being that, you know, again, from Racine, 79 miles to the nearest port.
So where did the fish
go?
Could they
withstand
that kind of cold?
They lay low.
They lay low.
Yeah.
So the two basins in the lake are 800 and 819 feet deep is the deepest point on the north end.
And on the south end here, just near Racine and Kenosha, it gets to just over 400 feet deep.
They go to the warmest water they can find.
So when it ices out on top, it might be 42, 43 degrees down deep.
And that's where they'll lay for the season.
And then when it warms up in the spring, the southern end warms up first.
They kind of find their way down by Indiana and they work up the shorelines as it starts to warm up around the lake.
We're talking to John Sobchuk.
He is the president of Salmon Unlimited.
The folks have run Salmon Arama's daughter Lily's here.
She does all the legwork.
She does all the heavy lifting and she's here today to help us.
She's the brains of the outfit.
does that make him?
I was trying to decide what to say about Jim then.
will fortune is the chairman of the events since you were kind of leading into that.
I'm the president of the organization behind it.
Jim is the chairman who spearheads the planning for Salmonorama all year round and is basically living down there to help run it.
Well,
I called yesterday.
I called a number that was given to me and the guy said, yeah, what do you want?
He was out of breath and I said, well, I wanted to talk to you.
We'd put stuff together now.
Would you like me to call an ambulance?
Do you need oxygen?
What's going
on?
With yesterday's, the last two days, heat and humidity down there, it was pretty rough.
We didn't have as many people yesterday as we thought we would.
So Wednesday we have our traditional setup night.
We had a good turnout, probably 45-50 of our club members.
But there was still more to be done.
And so yesterday we were scrambling.
I ended up taking a personal day from work because I had a couple things come up.
My boat actually had some motor issues and we had to get a lot of this stuff done.
So I recruited Lily and a couple of the young friends again and we pulled it off.
We're ready to go.
So what do you do in your real life
when you're not fishing and having fun?
I give away other people's money and hope to get paid back.
That's a nice job.
I'm
a
business banker.
He's a banker.
Oh, OK.
As I say, that's a nice job.
He
says it like that to be funny.
It's true.
It's memorable.
It's funny.
So let's talk about the festival part.
We're talking about
the
fishing part now.
And onshore, Festival Park, which is actually Rotary Park.
Yeah, it's Rotary Park at Festival Hall.
Right.
I know.
It's a whole big title.
And you're going to have beautiful weather this weekend for it.
It's a sunshine all weekend, nice temperatures.
So what's on land?
Yes, so you land lovers
and it's not
land lovers.
It's land lovers
today We fire it off at 3 p.m.
To start and I use that term accurately because we've got broken 45 taken the stage at 430 all the games all the kids games are gonna be open We've got blue sky bounce houses coming the bounce houses and the kids fishing pond have a nominal fee for usage
But we also have probably 10 different games available for kids, including ski ball, pop-a-shop, basketball, air hockey, foosball, yard games.
Like I said, we'll have music playing casually.
But at 4.30, our opening act, Broken 45, which is a group of high school students out of Oak Creek that are playing not only here, but they're also playing State Fair this year.
They'll be opening it up under the tent.
and that at 7.30, the cheap shots are in town.
They'll be playing on the main stage, on the rotary stage, and they'll be playing through the night up until the fireworks, which is 9.20.
Yeah, let's start with the fireworks again.
Yes, going off with a bang.
Let's talk about those
fireworks.
There we go.
All the dogs in the neighborhood hiding in closets.
You know, you say that, but I've actually got two messages I need to follow up with people asking if they could bring their dogs down.
Oh, I don't
know.
I don't
know.
Well, that'll be their discretion.
They might leave before the fireworks start.
Yeah.
But, you know, Festival Parks rules online say one thing about dogs, but then their their farmers market for Saturday, which they run, they organize and run, says that friendly dogs are allowed.
So we got to get clarification for them.
But I think that dogs, well-behaved dogs are probably allowed.
We'll get back to Patrick on that.
We have a pit bull that comes over every Friday.
Yeah, it was a dog and I went down to the fourth fast fireworks and my wife was left with yeah, Juniper Juniper went right to the closet my wife already put a bedding down and she stayed in and here's this So does our dog and she just laid in the and she when my wife went left the room She would come up poke her nose out and just go right back into the closet and I felt terrible
Yeah,
she's so terrified of any noise dogs are like that.
Yeah,
and I just I felt bad for her
There was a dog on a charter boat over by a chart room
on the 4th of July when we pulled up completely comfortable with the fireworks.
It was amazing.
It was chilling.
And I had to ask him.
I said, this doesn't seem normal.
He said, yeah, he's pretty special.
Yeah.
And they always say give your dog a little bit of Benadryl on the 4th
of July.
And that will make them loopy.
It works for me too.
OK,
so let's talk about the hours for salmon around.
Because it actually runs next week too, right?
Yes.
OK, so.
So it's this weekend and it's
basically it starts today at three p.m.
And we'll go till about 10 30 11 o'clock when the band's done after the fireworks because they will resume after the fireworks briefly to finish out and then the rest of the time it'll be 9 a.m.
is typically when we open the gates to start our way in and you know many of the activities are available throughout that going all the way until 10 p.m.
on most nights on the big band nights the Fridays and Saturdays it'll be till 11 p.m.
And it does go through the rest of the week, but the festival part is kind of toned down Monday through Thursday,
right?
Yeah, we have stuff going on, but we did mellow it out just so that we didn't need as many volunteers.
We can rotate and give some of them a break.
So tonight is going to be lit.
It's loaded.
There is so much to do.
Tomorrow, same thing.
We've got two hype crews are act.
They tour nationally.
There's an opening band again before that.
We have our free fish boil tomorrow as well.
So that's, I think, a three or four p.m.
that we start serving for the community, a free fish boil, along with everything else going on.
Sunday, we have a partnership with the Veterans Outreach Center of Wisconsin, the VOW, and we're hosting a car show with them.
They're doing bingo, they're doing meat raffles, and the proceeds of that are going to help the VOW.
Again, we run this event to support our community, and some of those funds we keep and then issue out throughout the year, but that one's going directly to them.
Monday, we still have one of our club events, which is called Super Sweeps.
It's a mini tournament in the morning.
Beyond that, it's just, it's going to be a little more mellow day, Tuesday also.
But then Wednesday, we bring in John 23.
It's a youth educational group based out of St.
Patrick's Church here in Racine.
Youth outreach and development, and they're going to host events in the afternoon.
They've got their own band coming in.
We're even going to host the kids fish pond on their behalf where any proceeds
for people paying for the fish pond that day, we'll go directly to them as well.
Thursday, we have our Paralyzed Veterans Association, PVA, Paralyzed Vets outing.
So we take out 30 to 50 vets every year on charter boats in partnership with the CNH case.
They take them out fishing.
The City of Racine Fire and Paramedics help load and unload safely those participants and their guests.
We have a lunch, a color guard, a band, everything waiting for them, awards afterward.
just an event to honor our heroes.
And then next week, Friday and next week, Saturday, just as lit as this weekend, big bands, all the entertainment.
Saturday has got a bags tournament, Cornhole, make sure I say it right.
That I can do.
Yes.
So there's a huge Cornhole tournament.
Probably if it's not the largest in the state, it might be the second largest, but it is big.
It's going from 8 a.m.
until like 10 p.m.
There's so many teams, professional players coming in.
Really cool to check out.
I
heard Stuart talking about last year's winner.
Was it 30 pounds?
Was that what he said?
Oh, for the fish?
Yeah.
Oh, last year's was a little lighter.
Yeah.
They're usually 30 to 40 or 30, 38 pounds.
That's heavy.
Oh, it's heavy, yeah.
So there's a cycle with the DNR in how many fish they stock between Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin.
And the last couple of years, they've added a lot more
Fry you know a small salmon coho and Chinook and so the bait to predator fish ratio is a little stronger Meaning the fish are gonna be a little lighter the next couple years.
There's talk about they might taper it down on the number of fish they plant next year So I'm you know, we're there's a lot of guys joking in our club that this could be the year of brown trout or lake trout wins it again just because the the salmon aren't as large as they You know have been over the prior couple years where we had a 35 pounder
38 pounder when it
my thank you guys for coming in Josh soap check who is the president of salmon unlimited that runs salmon around his daughter Lily who runs Josh Well salmon around starts off today the fishing tournament at midnight tonight, but the actual festival starts
come on down to the festival 3
p.m.. At
the fish pond
Okay, thank you guys for coming.
Thank you appreciate
