Home Forums Fishing Freshwater Lake Erie = 130 Million Walleyes !!!

My Grandson's first trip out...




Based on models of the combined research efforts, Hartman speculated, there could be a population of 130 million walleye in the lake. Or more.

Lake Erie

Good stuff!!

Lake Powell in southern Utah has so many walleye and stripers that there is no season, no limit, and they strongly discourage catch and release. When five or six of us go down and fish from a houseboat for a few days, it is not unusual to bring home fillets of 300 stripers and 100 walleye. One annual trip fills a freezer. While we're there, we live on the crappie, bass, and channel cats we catch as byproducts.

Bill, they don't seem as plump as lots of the fish that you have posted pictures of in years past. That is what happened to our Lake Michigan king salmon when the commercial guys netted out lots of the alewives forage base. In the '70's we could go out after work and get 5 30 plus pounders and anything over about 20 now is rare. The smaller ones eat better anyway walleyes included.

4 years ago we put 5 ten+ pounders in my boat that summer ( and a lot of 9’s & under). Then we had 2 slow years in a row.
Last summer we caught tons of 15 to 20” fish, where in years past 25 to 28” was the normal size. Most ten + pounders run 28 to 33”.

Hopefully those smaller fish from last year are up to 25 to 27” this year. It seems to depend on the available forage base. When the Emerald Shiners are abundant, the bait pods are up to 70’ deep !! Everything seems to love the Gobies now.

Lake Powel sounds like a GREAT place to fish. We get Walleyes, Perch, S M Bass, Catfish, Northerns, Lake trout to 40#, Stealhead, and a few Salmon, and Muskies. The Sturgeon get up to 7’, but you have to immediately release them.

Here's a LINK to Wayne's Words, the definitive angler's info source for Lake Powell. In this week's report he and two other guys boated 80 stripers in a morning. Including one trophy-sized one. Reading his weekly reports make me squirm in my seat with anticipation of my next trip there.

Lake Erie right now.... It will be a while !!

Anyone want to trade some Lake Erie walleye trips for some Lake O salmon trips??

I live right between E & O !

Use to fish Ontario quite a bit at the area around the Bar.





Got to old to pull in a dozen of those pigs (72 now) so I quit fishing the Big “O” when my partner died that I fished there with.

It’s tough planning an outing on Erie. It’s common to drive down to Barcelona and have to turn around because of 6’ers.
I’m lucky if I get my grandson out twice a year. He got a 10.5 #er, and was chumming the lake 3 min later in 4 foot waves.

!


My Erie partner has to drive my boat a lot of the time. Hand and leg cramps kill me after a day of fishing.

That lad is happy.

I've enjoyed watching that grandson of yours grow up through HA photos and your new ones. Erie isn't as deep as Michigan and probably blows up even faster. The weakest thing on a boat is the people and I saw that chumming thing way too often helping my buddy with his charter boat. Worst was when they didn't want to do their tender tummy act over the side and almost made it to the toilet down below. It is a wonder that we didn't drown a bunch of those Minnesota guys who would drive over with their outboard 16 footers and come hell or high water, they were going fishing. High water was the norm out there. I remember one salmon we had on the line that was above us in a wave!

Yes, he kind of grew up on the lake...




We use to fish a lot of tournaments (and did fairly well) and my partner still wines about when 9’ waves pulled a Walleye right off his hook. It was a large fish, and would have won us more money, but I don’t think it was a 12#er like he swears it was.

Funny how the ones that get away keep growing !!

When can I come? 🙂

No ch~tt, I've been trying to figure out if it would be cheaper to drive out and take my boat, or fly out and buy one out there.

Waves on Lake Erie....

Walleye Chop !!

Yup, I like the one with the skull looking pattern in the top of the wave, Now imagine a whole flotilla of 16' Mr. Pike Lunds out there 22 miles after the skamania rainbows. Many a time they got out there in the pre-dawn calm water and got caught in a blow when the sun and wind came up. We knocked down a lot of big waves for those guys that limped back in behind our wake. Like a bunch of mosquitoes out there running over our lines and blocking our trolling lanes. The captain had more colorful names for them. Those little boats would go out of sight in the trough of the waves and then reappear on the top again. Tom had the side scanning sonar, radar, UHF radio, CB radio and radio directional finder on board, so we were usually on the fish, so we had a good reputation and usually an entourage. I cleaned a lot of fish in those days.

I just posted a video of guys fishing the Lake Powell striper boils (not me) but it'll give you an idea of what it can be like there.