Lake Erie is now swimming with walleye
The numbers that matter to most fishermen involve weight, length and the daily catch limit, though anglers are sometimes forced to reckon with other figures.
The $25 cost of an annual resident Ohio fishing license hopefully doesn’t discourage participation. However, the price of gasoline, should it continue its climb toward an arm for regular and a leg for premium, will affect other costs, including dining, bait, vehicle operation and boat travel.
Lake Erie charter skippers, faced additionally with general inflation, will be under pressure to increase prices. Some walleye chasers will be able to pay to play, some will not.
Startled by a rapidly shrinking dollar, recreational anglers might become less enthusiastic about going the distance — from Columbus to Lake Erie, say — if they deem the cost not commensurate with the potential benefit.
Given that current set of cheerless economic influences, it’s not without at least a little irony that the benefits of the chase for walleye on Lake Erie have seldom been more potentially rewarding.
Limit catches of six walleyes should be routine in 2022 based on what the Ohio Division of Wildlife described in a recent release thusly: “Hatch success has been exceptional for six of the past eight years.”
In other words, the big lake is brimming with walleye of varied sizes and ages.
It follows that anyone making a walleye expedition to Lake Erie needs to pay attention to the 15-inch minimum length limit. Abundant 2-year-old fish could provide plenty of hookups. Some of those 2020 fish might appear long enough to keep but likely won’t in actuality be of legal length until at least late summer or fall.
So the rule is catch, put to tape any suspects and then quickly and gently release walleye that don’t measure up.
Expect to catch the bulk of keepers — that is 15- to 22-inch fish — from hatches two to four years ago, the division release stated. Larger fish hatched from 2015 and earlier should be plentiful.
Yellow perch, though in numbers looking promising in areas west of Huron, might not be sufficient in fillet size or consistent in location to lure caravans of SUVS and pickups hauling trailered boats from distant points of the Buckeye State.
At any rate, the perch tend to be scattered until schools gather beginning late summer into fall. A 30-fish daily limit will be in effect for the western basin and off the Ohio shore from Fairport Harbor east.
The daily limit will remain 10 perch in the waters between Huron and Fairport Harbor. The 10-perch limit and the generally smallish size of caught fish has caused even some local anglers to give up the chase for now.
Ohio’s daily catch limits on walleye and yellow perch are tied to what is termed the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) that is adjusted in late March by fishery biologists from Ohio, Ontario, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York.
The TAC, which allocates the maximum catch allowed in various lake districts, is derived from a model of the estimated fish populations. The arrangement is designed to ensure the number of yellow perch and walleye taken from the lake in a given year don’t harm prospects for future sustainability.
The TAC fluctuates with Lake Erie fish populations.
This year’s walleye TAC is 14.533 million fish lakewide, an increase from last year’s 12.248 million. The yellow perch TAC increased to 7.185 million pounds, a bump from 6.238 million.
However, the perch TAC for a shared Ohio and Ontario section of the central basin decreased to .537 million pounds from .615 million a year ago.
outdoors@dispatch.com