Well here is the situation, there is a river in Lake Michigan that gets a wild run of summer kings. I fished it for the first time with a varety of techniques with no success last summer, but wanna give it a go again soon. The only thing I can think of why they don't bite to good is a lot of locals rip on them like you wouldn't believe so that has to put a damper on them. There anything you guys could think of that would be worth trying? The water always runs crystal clear. My goal is to get them on floats and my center pin. These fish have to bite something, they can't be any more silver when they first come in.

Downtime
Try to match what they eat in the lake!!
Crawdad tails peeled whith a chunk of eggs
or a small fillet of the baitfish they eat with a chunk of eggs!!! Hope this helps!! It works in the west so it should work in the east!!!

Can you give us some idea of the size of river you're on? Techniques are going to differ from fishing a tiny trib to a good sized river. When fishing for kings you're looking at either getting an irrated bite, or a feeding bite. That fish still looks like a feeder so fishtale is right on. I'd try throwing the same variety we throw at them here, sand shrip and eggs, prawn and eggs, tuna balls, straight eggs, tuna and eggs, sardine and eggs, etc etc. Not all of it is what they feed on, they'll hit a tuna ball and I'm relatively sure the salmon around here don't feed on tuna. Anyway, if I thought the fish were easily irrated I'd fish something like spinners, or other hardware like plugs to illicit a strike. Here we use large metal wobblers, without scent, and I just don't think these fish are striking that, thinking "yummy." Fill us in with a little more info, and best of luck to you. Tight lines, FC.

The river is actually small maybe 30-40 feet wide, but with a brutal flow. Although there are lots of deep holes most of the holes we fish are between 5 and 15 feet deep, its amazaing you look down into a hole and can see bottom and wouldn't think twice there is a fish in there. You see a guy put his rig through there. hooks one and you see about a dozen scatter around the hole. That fish in my avatar is a pier caught king last week, we fish both floats and bottom rods. That Lamiglas rod is now sitting at the bottom of the lake due to an embarassing mis-hap with my hand slipping while a king was taking a run. Nothing IMO beats those on light tackle, never seen a fish empty a spool so fast without a hint of slowing down.