Lake Erie

Why Erie fishes the way it does

Erie is the shallow one, and everything follows from that. Sunlight reaches bottom over most of the western basin, so plants and plankton grow across the whole footprint rather than in a thin coastal ribbon. Water warms early and stays warm, which lengthens the growing season for every fish in it. The result is a lake that produces fish at a rate the deep, cold, sterile upper lakes cannot approach.

The basin structure matters too. Erie has three of them. The western basin — from the Michigan line to the islands — averages around 25 feet and holds the reef complex where the walleye spawn. The central basin off Cleveland deepens into a broad flat that stratifies in summer and develops low-oxygen bottom water. The eastern basin past Erie, Pennsylvania is deep and cold enough to hold lake trout and to give steelhead a summer refuge.

Shallow also means violent. A lake averaging 62 feet has no depth to absorb wind energy, so the waves stand up short and steep instead of rolling. Erie’s chop breaks on itself. That is why a lake most anglers think of as the friendly, easy Great Lake has an outsized reputation among people who run boats on it.

Phosphorus, the dead zone, and the walleye boom

In the 1960s Erie was the poster child for a wrecked lake. Municipal sewage and phosphate detergents dumped nutrients into a shallow warm basin, algae exploded, and when the blooms died and decomposed they pulled oxygen out of the central basin bottom water. Mayfly hatches vanished from the western basin. Popular coverage declared the lake dead. It was not dead — it was over-fed.

The response was the 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between the United States and Canada, phosphorus limits on detergents, and a very large public investment in sewage treatment on both shores. Loading dropped, blooms shrank, oxygen returned to the central basin, and by the mid-1980s the mayflies were back in numbers that surprised the people who had written the lake off.

The fishery responded on top of that. Improving water quality coincided with a walleye population that had been rebuilding since commercial gill-netting for walleye was curtailed, and Erie ran through a series of enormous year classes that turned Port Clinton into the self-declared walleye capital of the world. The charter fleet that exists on the Ohio shore today was built in that window.

The problem did not stay solved. Beginning in the mid-2000s western-basin blooms returned, and this time the driver was different: dissolved reactive phosphorus running off row-crop farmland in the Maumee River watershed, delivered in spring rain events. That form of phosphorus is immediately available to algae, and unlike a sewage outfall there is no single pipe to regulate. Bloom severity now tracks spring rainfall in the Maumee basin closely enough that NOAA issues a seasonal forecast for it. In 2014 a bloom-derived toxin shut off drinking water for Toledo for two days.

None of that has hurt the walleye. It is, however, the single most consequential open question about the lake, and it is a soil-and-hydrology problem, not a fisheries one.

The ports worth launching from

Port Clinton and Catawba are the center of gravity: shortest run to the reef complex and the islands, and more walleye boats on a June Saturday than most states launch in a year.

Sandusky puts you inside a protected bay with its own spring fishery and easy access to the islands.

Monroe, Michigan works the far western corner and the Detroit River mouth — excellent spring jig water.

Lorain and Cleveland open the central basin, where summer trolling and the fall night bite happen.

Erie, Pennsylvania gives you Presque Isle Bay for shelter, deep eastern-basin water outside it, and the Alley tributaries in every direction.

Dunkirk and Barcelona, New York anchor the east end with steelhead, walleye and access to the deepest water in the lake.

How to approach the lake as a visitor

Read the marine forecast like it is a gate, not a suggestion. Erie is the lake where visiting anglers most often misjudge conditions, because 20 knots does not sound like much until you are in it over 25 feet of water.

Come in the right week for what you want. Reef jigging peaks in April, open-basin trolling from June through August, perch in late summer, and steelhead from the first cool October rain onward.

You do not need a large boat to fish the western basin well, but you do need to watch the wind clock and to be willing to be off the water by noon. Plenty of excellent Erie fishing happens in an 18-foot aluminum boat that leaves the ramp at 5 a.m. and is on the trailer before the afternoon builds.

If you are fishing the tributaries, go on a weekday. Steelhead Alley is a world-class fishery inside a two-hour drive of several million people, and it fishes like it.