With the climate warming, the ice on Lake Erie is rapidly receding. We have a lot of great fishing to look forward to in the coming months. The rest of this month and April, rainbow trout is the hot topic for sport fishing. However, in April you can fish the open lake or Près Isle Bay for huge Smallmouth Bass. Largemouths are also in the bay, but we don’t usually see largemouths as large as those caught in the southern states. Smallmouth fishing is hard to beat on Lake Erie. It’s not uncommon to catch a smallmouth bass over 20 inches and that’s the size the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission has designated as a true trophy bass.
The Fish Commission has established a trophy bass season from April 18 to June 12, 2009. During this period, only one fish may be kept and it must be larger than 20 inches. The rest of the year, you can have 4 largemouth bass (combined) over 15 inches. These regulations are for Lake Erie and the Bay of Près Isle.
When I tell people that bass have to be this big to keep them out of Lake Erie, many are very surprised. I routinely walk up and down the south pier that links the bay to Lake Erie and see much smaller bass in people’s buckets. One day I talked to a fisherman who couldn’t speak English who had seven bass in his bucket about 10-12 inches. I explained to her English-speaking daughter that the bass had to be 15 inches long to keep them and that she needed to throw them back in the water. She did, but this still makes me think that a lot of basses are kept that are much smaller than 15 inches.
Anyway, the size limit, I believe, is set properly and it is common to catch fish in the 15-20 inch size range. In April and May, largemouths especially are very aggressive and can be caught on almost any lure that passes through their spawning nets. I usually do much better with largemouth bass in late July and August when water temperatures are higher and I can use higher waters.
Smallmouth Bass fishing is very good to excellent from where the docks run out of Almost Isle Bay all the way to Twenty Mile Creek on the eastern side of Erie County. Early in the season, largemouth bass will be in less than fifteen feet of water and can also be caught by wading inshore. Many anglers stay near the mouth of the creeks, but I’ve had some really good days fishing quite a ways from the mouth of the creeks, so if you’re not fishing, just move somewhere else.
I have a new spinner to test and if you want to help me test it and compare it to other spinners please visit my blog and email me from there. Test results will be provided in a forthcoming ezine article. I have a large quantity of these spinners to supply to anglers for performance testing. Hopefully the basses will like them as much as the company that makes them.
May your lines be tight and your hooks happy!
