Sport fishing in the bay a growing attraction
Ben Gottfried used to have to drive for hours to find a good place to ice fish for walleye.
But this winter his favourite angling spot is only 15 minutes from his home — Hamilton Harbour.
Yes, that’s right. The body of water known across the country for pollution and excesses of carp, is now gaining a reputation as a sport fishing haven with feisty, mature walleye from tiny fingerling stocking efforts over the past several years.
“We now have a size of walleye that rivals any sport fishery in Ontario,” says Gottfried, 31, who works for a development consulting firm.
In early January, Gottfried landed his biggest walleye, weighing eight pound and reaching 28 inches long. In all, he figures he’s caught close to a dozen, varying from 15 inches upward this ice fishing season.
“It’s a fantastic fishery to have so close to the urban Hamilton area. And it is amazing to see it rebounding in the way that it has,” he says.
Through the 1800s walleye were abundant in the harbour, but severely declined in the early 1900s, because of industrialization and
other stresses, and virtually disappeared.
In the 1990s, researchers tried stocking the bay with fingerling walleye, but those efforts were largely unsuccessful amid serious water quality problems. More recently, with water quality and habitat improvements, the MNR released more than 100,000 fingerlings in the bay in 2012.
According to a recent MNR report: “All indications to date are that the 2012 walleye stocking effort in Hamilton Harbour was highly successful, in terms of survival and growth rates.”
It’s believed the large walleye that Gottfried caught this winter came from 2012. The smaller ones he hooked likely come from a similar MNR stocking in 2016.
The cold winter has also been good news for ice anglers. It’s meant they can walk out onto the ice. They couldn’t do that last winter or the winter before.
This year, more than half the harbour has frozen over enough for ice fishing. And Gottfried says it’s common to see 20 to 30 fishing huts on weekends with anglers looking for walleye as well as perch, crappie and pike.
Colin Lake, a biologist with the MNR, says: “This is a nice story that has evolved. Certainly there are still challenges in the harbour. But when people start looking at it as a place they can go to fish, I think that is a positive thing.”
Lake says walleye, as a species, were chosen for stocking efforts because the harbour needs a robust predator fish to bring the
bay into a more balanced ecology.
“The issue in Hamilton Harbour is not the number of fish. There are huge numbers of fish — lots of channel catfish and brown bullheads and carp — but there isn’t a dominant predator. About 20 to 25 per cent should be predator fish.”
Now attention is turning, he says, to whether the walleye will successfully spawn. Researchers from the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans have been monitoring that and will be out again this summer as well.
“This year we should be able to know for sure,” says Christine Boston, from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Lake says numerous pairs have been seen “at the right place at the right time.
“It looks like they are spawning. But we are not aware of wild offspring. The adults may do their part, but it’s not clear whether the eggs are hatching and the young surviving.”
Chris McLaughlin, executive director of the Bay Area Restoration Council, says the emergence
of mature walleye is a “testament to how much progress has been made to improve water quality in Hamilton Harbour.”
“It’s often a huge surprise to people to see such a magnificent creature growing up in our bay. But it’s also a reminder that all of that work must continue, that there are still many hurdles to overcome before we have a healthy ecosystem of many native fish populations.”