That is one of the reasons that the
state has gone to a 14-inch minimum keeper length, reduced
the creel limit from eight to five, and instituted a
catch-and-release only or closed-to-possession season - set
for May 1 through June 23, during spawning.
The restrictions and spring bass closure, which also affects
largemouth bass in Lake Erie water, will be in their third
year and it may take four to five years to truly assess its
impact, Knight said, inasmuch as it takes four to five years
for Erie smallmouth to reach 14 inches and spawning age.
The biologist noted that reliable methods of immediately
assessing and measuring the success of a given year's hatch
have proven elusive. That is because smallmouth do not lend
themselves to relatively straightforward assessments, such
as trawl surveys, as is done with walleye and yellow perch.
So it usually takes four or more years to tell whether a
given year-class has succeeded - when fish start turning up
in creel surveys.
Creel surveys last year, for the first time in several
years, documented a fair number of smaller fish, Knight
explained, and he expects more of the same this year.
"It should be coming up," he said of the bass stock. "The
clear-water phase of the '90s was good for smallmouth bass."
Even though the lake has grown "greener" and more turbid of
late because of unwanted blue-green algae blooms and lower
lake levels, Knight remains hopeful.
"Overall the lake [still] is well-suited for bass."
He added that the catch-and-release-only season has had the desired
effect of vastly reducing bass harvests, from the
50,000-60,000 range to just the 10,000 range since the
season was established. Fishing pressure likewise plummeted
from 360,000 hours to just 200,000.
"These are major reductions in pressure during spawning. The
tournaments went other places [during May-June]." The
closure, Knight said, also reduced "meat" fishing for bass
from among some resident anglers as well as those from West
Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.
The closure, during which any bass caught must immediately
be released, allows males to quickly return to nest-guarding
duties against the hordes of egg-predatory gobies.
"The jury is out if the fish are going to reproduce better.
[But] I don't think we've got a crashing population by any
stretch."
He noted that smallmouth have turned so strongly to eating
gobies, which themselves gobble an old standby smallmouth
food - soft-shelled crayfish - "that we may need to use
goby-like lures and colors and lure action that mimics
gobies."
Steelhead trout - This popular salmon is essentially a
lake-run rainbow trout that fattens up and grows larger than
its stream-run cousins because of far better forage in the
lake, where they spend much of their time before making
spawning runs into Erie tributaries.
Steelhead here essentially are a non reproducing, nonnative,
stocked species, and their presence in the lake depends on
an annual planting of some 400,000 young fish each spring in
rivers from the Vermilion River east to Conneaut Creek near
the Pennsylvania line.
So these big trout, which range 17 to 29 inches in the sport
fishery, are not subject to the vagaries of unfavorable
weather or storms at spawning time, as are walleye, yellow
perch and smallmouth bass.
The stream fisheries are extremely popular among a core of dedicated
"steel headers," but many lake anglers have excellent
success most summers trolling in deep waters using spoons
run off Dipsy Divers, downriggers, planer boards and other
trolling gear. Most lake action is concentrated between
Vermilion and Conneaut, June through August.
Last year summer steelhead action was suppressed somewhat by
the heat, with water temperature rising as high as the upper
70s as deep as 60 feet east of Cleveland.
Fishing report - Until the recent stormy, windy weather,
some western Lake Erie anglers were taking limits of
walleye, fishing from small boats and using ice-jigging
techniques in the Port Clinton area.
Travis Hartman, a biologist at the state's Lake Erie
Fisheries Research Station at Sandusky, said that
jig-and-minnow fishing was producing limits in waters west
of Catawba Island peninsula as recently as Thursday, but
action shut down on Friday with the approach of the weekend
storm. Now the waters are highly muddied from the sustained
strong winds. |
