World-class fishing is a short drive away

Not so many years ago, back when there were but a handful of outdoor magazines and the Internet was only a gleam in scientists’ eyes, anglers rarely strayed far from their home waters, but still soaked up the great stories of big fish in exotic locations.

We learned about the world beyond our means in those days from Outdoor Life, Field & Stream and Sports Afield. I talked my parents into buying me a subscription to Outdoor Life and eagerly ripped through the pages for my fix of vicarious fishing thrills.

Today, as we prepare to greet another new year, a thought occurs about those wondrous fishing articles of yore. It is a fact as obvious as the nose on my face that Youngstown-area anglers live in the epicenter of fishing locales as deserving of fame as those placed on pedestals by the big magazines back in the days of my youth.

We have our own grand waters, where spectacular catches are not only possible, they are likely. And in an era when we decry the deterioration of circumstances deemed better “in the good ol’ days,” we can enjoy genuinely special fishing experiences very close to home.

How close? You could pour a hot cup of coffee in your favorite insulated travel cup and it’ll still be pleasantly warm enough to drink by the time you arrive at our own world-class steelhead, muskie, walleye and bass fishing destinations.

I have stood waist-deep in a great steelhead stream, the cold current compressing the waders around my legs like a fighter pilot’s G-suit, battling an acrobatic 10-pound trout hooked to a tiny nymph tied to a wispy leader. The scene could have been on a broad stretch of river in the Pacific Northwest, but it really was Conneaut Creek.

I have drawn the fillet knife along the rib cages of walleyes so fresh and tasty that one could be excused for imagining the scent of the smoke of a wood fire perfectly stoked for a shore lunch on an island in Ontario or Quebec. But the truth today is Lake Erie grows bigger and more numerous walleyes than even the most remote northland lake did back in the days when we knew about such fishing only through the printed pages.

Forty and more years ago, writers wore into cliché the phrase “the fish of a thousand casts” as they penned articles about great muskie waters in Wisconsin, Minnesota and New York. Readers yearned for the thrill of just one encounter with a giant muskie on one of those trip-of-a-lifetime vacations featured in the magazines. But in 2008, Youngstowners will find oversized muskies in nearby Lake Milton, the Mahoning River and West Branch Reservoir.

Want to sample the world’s best smallmouth bass fishing? You could hire a guide at Tennessee’s Dale Hollow Reservoir or book a canoe trip into the Quetico boundary waters of Minnesota and Ontario. Or you can tow your boat to Ashtabula and drift Erie’s 15- to 25-foot breaks.

Day in and day out, the fishing for famed Lake Okeechobee’s largemouth bass is less productive than what you’d experience at lakes Evans and Pine here in Mahoning County. Sure, there are many factors at work in this Okeechobee to Evans/Pine equation, but the fact is you can count on 30- to 40-bass days here near home, while the legendary Florida fish factory would struggle to keep up that pace.

So we close the book on 2007 with a cheery thought. If we stumble across a pile of money, we can go ahead and treat ourselves to fishing vacations at the world’s most renowned destinations.

But if that windfall just doesn’t materialize, we can still treat ourselves to some out-of-this-world fishing just a hot cup of coffee from home.

jwwollitz@aol.com