ERIE SMALLMOUTH BITE TRENDS EASTWARDby Jack Kiser
There is no longer any doubt among Lake Erie's smallmouth bass fishing fraternity that the days of the Western Basin being the big pond's preeminent bass fishery have gone the way of the hula hoop.
The islands of the area may well still be named after these glorious battlers, and an inordinate number of bass tournaments may still originate from that same old Sandusky-to-Lorain stretch, but the days of 100 fish days at Ruggles Reef or off Kelley's Island are now as much the stuff of past history as the Oldsmobile.
It is clear the residual effects of decades of tournaments that regularly displaced huge numbers og big spawning fish, and charter captains making at least a partial transition from walleye to bass (often without their boats even featuring any livewells at all) brought a largely uninformed and woefully insensitive tableau to their bass fishing that revealed the worst habits carried over from their walleye fishing that eventuated in either the outright keeping and eating of these valuable sportfish or smallmouth actually kept on stringers or in coolers like they were indeed mere walleye for end of the day photo ops, after which their carcasses were more than a few times witnessed thrown dead and dying into the waters in and around shipping lanes, harbors, and boat slips.
To be sure, other not so clear cut or easily understood variables may also be at work in Erie's ecosystem that may also contribute to or better explain the now obvious transition of smallmouth prominence from the west end-which, to be sure, still boasts more truly productive smallmouth days than any inland lake-to the east 's far superior bass waters that seem to improve exponentially as one heads eastward, promptly noticeable in the central basin's breakwall area's and drop-offs around Geneva, Ashtabula, and Ohio's current bass champ, Conneaut.The improvements continue seasonally heading eastward, towards the smallmouth nirvana to be experienced at Pennsylvania's Presque Isle and New York's Dunkirk shorelines. Savvy anglers have learned to remember that much as with walleyes and even yellow perch migrations that roam easterly as the open water season goes on, the bass fishing in the Western Basin peaks in April, the Central Basin most often in May, and the Eastern most often in June. Key variables hear include greater depths and consequently slower-to-warm waters the further eastward we move. Sadly, for many of us older Erie bassers, much spoiled by years of 100fish days of yore in the Western Basin, even at that end's current April peak it falls far short of even average days at the lake's other end.this is evidenced to at least some degree by the increasing number of the more prestigious tournaments that have in recent memory abandoned the general Sandusky area for venues closer to New York.
Here's hoping that a more enlightened and motivated generation of bass anglers can instill a new ethic that, combined with Ohio's long overdue closed season on smallmouth bass, will usher in not only safe maintenance of the eastern basin's bass bounties, but the eventual comeback of Erie's once predominant western locales.
*
Jack Kiser is the host of TV'S "Buckeye Angler", seen every Thursday evening at 7:30 and every Saturday morning at 6 on "The Cat", TV-35 in Cleveland and TV-29 in Akron (cable 14). You may reach him at his www.buckeyeangler.com Web site.
