Erie's best days???

[wakina]

I started fishing the lake in 1955 as a 7 year old boy after my father bought a 22 ft Cruise Along cabin boat at Gem Beach boat sales at Gem Beach, the salesman was Bob Clemens and his son opened up a boat sales on Sandusky Bay later in life.

We did not know very much about Pickerel (walleye) fishing at the time but did learn some things from Buck Perry and Glen Lau who both had weekly TV shows on our only TV channel available as well as from some of the local bait stores. We started fishing with the time tested Helein Flatfish which is still available but is now made with synthetic materials instead of wood by the Yakima Bait company. I cannot remember the exact size or what F series we used but the colors were Orange with black dots, red and white and the frog color all were about 4 inches long they were the only ones available at the local shops. We always tipped the gang hooks with a night crawler.

Most of our fishing was confined to the South Passage and maybe once a month we would make the run from East Harbor to the Niagara Reef area. The reef area always produced allot of walleyes and I can remember having walleyes laying in the bottom of the boat as well as having the cooler full also. Looking back at in time I am no longer proud of those days as there was no limit on either size or numbers and it was not uncommon to have 40 or 50 walleyes from a days fishing at the Niagara Reef area it just seems to me that we over did our harvest and should have been more conservative. We had no sonar or VHF radios to help us. We just simply went fishing.

Then the pollution hit the lake in the sixties and you would fish all summer for the same number of fish we now catch in a week, the walleyes just disappeared. During this time the smelt population exploded and as the lake became cleaner again and the walleyes made their recovery the population boomed and that was the beginning of what we have today. There was an overabundance of food with the large smelt population and the walleyes grew to a much larger size than before the bust.

The state stepped in and put a 10 fish limit per day per fisherman. It was not uncommon to have a ten fish limit in the 80 to 100 lb range. But the fishing had changed and we no longer trolled but were drifting and casting worm harnesses and lake Erie Hellions. As the population started to decrease again the state again lowered the limit from 10 fish to 6 fish per day per angler.

So in spite of mans best efforts to destroy the lake, along with it the fishery, by(with) greed, pollution and ecological destructive practices the lake still produces walleyes by the millions. It is more balanced today and the results are the food base remains large enough to support those millions not only in numbers but large enough to grow them to trophy size.

[chumthrower]

Glen Lau. I haven't heard that name in a long, long time.