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Most of you know I’m a bass guy, but this is not to say I don’t enjoy a tug from a trout
Most of you know I’m a bass guy, but this is not to say I don’t enjoy a tug from a trout every once in a while.
I gravitated to bass 30 years ago as a result of circumstances that pulled me down that path. The foundation for every angling specialist, myself included, is built on the joy of watching a bobber dunk or a tight line twitch. While we may branch out to focus on a species, we are rooted in fishing for whatever is available.
Pretty much every week from April Fool’s Day to Halloween you will find me on a lake or river somewhere between Erie, Pa., and East Liverpool, standing on the BassCat’s front deck casting for bass.
But here in Ohio we have a thing called cold weather. It’s a bad time for bass fishing.
So what’s an angler to do to pass the time that crawls slowly across the calendar pages … November … December … January … February … March?
More and more of us are going trout fishing.
For many years, trout fishing was mostly relegated to pay lakes right after the ice thawed. The vast majority of Ohio’s lakes and streams are simply too warm to sustain cold- water-loving trout once they soak up summer’s warmth.
Some Youngstown-area anglers ponied up for Pennsylvania nonresident licenses to work the stocked streams, but the majority of us experienced trout only when Ohio Water Service (today’s Aqua Ohio) opened Pine Lake early for hatchery-raised rainbows.
Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife has been in the trout business for many years. Its stocking of Lake Erie tributaries with steelhead has created a very good fishery that is already this year getting anglers’ attention.
The state division also stocks small reservoirs with rainbow trout to create “put-and-take” fisheries. Ohio also has a program to sustain a few stream brown trout fisheries.
None of the fish in Ohio’s stocking program are native to Ohio. They all are raised in Division of Wildlife fish hatcheries. With some 1.3 million anglers, Ohio considers its trout program a significant way to help satisfy their fishing desires.
To find out what Ohioans think and feel about trout fishing, the Division of Wildlife invites all to participate in an online survey.
The survey goes into depth to learn about anglers’ fishing tendencies as well as what they know and believe about the fishery in Ohio. To take the survey, go to www.wildohio.gov and click on the survey link.
It is a great opportunity to inform those who are tasked with making trout fishing work in Ohio. With input from anglers about their experiences and preferences, fishery managers can make good decisions about where and how to stock the waters.
Ohio’s steelhead program is a great example of the potential. The streams that run into Lake Erie are winter-feeding areas for big steelhead trout. They migrate toward the tributaries in September and run into them once the water flow and temperature is suitable.
Steelhead, which are lake-run rainbows, grow fast in Erie, and by the time they show up in the streams in the fall, many of the fish are in the 8- to 10-pound class. And while they had a hatchery upbringing, Ohio’s steelhead fight like the wildest wilderness fish.
Thanks to Ohio for bringing steelhead to us. When cold weather is coming, we can always head to the Lake Erie streams. Take the survey and let the Division of Wildlife know what you’d like them to do to make steelheading and other trout fishing better for you.