Wintertime on Steelhead Alley

[Spiel]

Wintertime on Steelhead Alley

 

 

Jan. 24, 2010

Eric Sharp / www.freep.com

 

Video

 

 

ROCKY RIVER, Ohio -- They call it Steelhead Alley, a 200-mile stretch of Lake Erie shoreline between the Vermilion River in Ohio and Cattaraugus Creek in New York, where a dozen hookups with the big rainbows is a slow day and 50-fish days are commonplace.

 

This proves to be a slow day. The last time I fished Ohio steelhead streams with guide Jim Chamberlin of Monroe was in early spring, when Little Manistee strain fish from Michigan hatcheries were pouring into the Vermilion River and hitting about anything you offered them.

 

This day Chamberlin and two friends, Jim Arnovitz and Gary Lee from Temperance, were fishing a warm-water discharge at a power plant in Avon Lake, with huge ice floes mounded up at the harbor entrance 100 yards away. But as they bounced along the bottom and drifted jigs below a float, the bites were few and far between.

 

Arnovitz, who fishes these Ohio streams at least once a week, has already announced that even a dozen hookups would be very disappointing. On a trip in December to the Conneaut River about 50 miles to the east, he and another angler jumped more than 80 fish in one day.

 

"This is the slowest I've ever seen it," he said. "That's why I love the Conneaut. We always do well there."

 

Unfortunately, on this day the Conneaut was locked up solid with ice, and Chamberlin decided to start at the power plant where he had landed 19 fish the previous day.

 

While we aren't doing much, an angler in a belly boat is fishing right up against the outflow from the power plant, a place 100 yards away that wading anglers can't reach. I see him land seven fish in less an hour, and another shore angler tells me he saw the man catch and release at least 10 before that.

 

"A lot of people have been bringing kayaks to fish this. Now I know why," Chamberlin said. "The fish that were in here might have moved up to that deep pool. It's as far up as they can get."

 

Fishing along Steelhead Alley follows a predictable seasonal pattern. The fish first show up in big numbers by early October in western New York streams like the legendary Cattaraugus Creek, and they are mostly steelhead raised from eggs obtained from New York's Salmon River on Lake Ontario.

 

By the end of October, steelhead raised from eggs collected on Trout Run and Godfrey Run in Pennsylvania, which plants more than a million steelhead each year, are pouring into every creek and ditch along that state's 40-mile stretch of Lake Erie shoreline. Pennsylvania tributaries like the Elk River get so many fish it looks as if you could walk on them. But those rivers also see the heaviest fishing pressure, because they are a one-day trip for anglers from cities like Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Cleveland.

 

Rivers in eastern Ohio like the Conneaut, Rocky and Grand start seeing bigger runs in November, mostly Pennsylvania fish that stray west looking for spawning sites. That bite continues strong into March, when big runs of Little Manistee strain steelhead from Michigan start pouring into rivers as far west as the Vermilion, at 130 miles the closest to Detroit.

 

Chamberlin said the weather is the primary factor in determining where to fish in winter.

 

"The Vermilion can be great, but it's locked solid with ice right now, while for some reason the Rocky is open," he said as he drove 30 minutes from the power plant at Avon Lake to the Rocky River. "I was thinking about going to the Conneaut, but a friend told me that although some of the really good holes on the upper river are open, most of the lower river is so blocked with ice that the fish can't even get up.

 

"You need to have a lot of places where you can fish, depending on the ice and how high the water is, and be willing to move to two or three or four different rivers during the day."

 

Things are still slow on the Rocky, but the anglers get a few bites, and the three steelhead they land are "chromers," fish fresh from the lake whose sides gleam like a mirror in the January sunshine.

 

Tim Gleason, from nearby Parma, Ohio, fishes Cleveland-area streams a dozen times a month, and he wishes that the state would plant fewer of the Little Manistee strain fish (now about 400,000 a year in five rivers) and more of the London strain fish that start to come into the rivers in November

 

He said that last year he caught 300 steelhead December through February, "but this year I've only caught 45 so far. Since they've gone to all Manistee strain, we just aren't seeing the numbers we used to."

 

What's very surprising is that even though this river is only 11 miles from downtown Cleveland, there are only a handful of other anglers at any point, and in a couple of places we're the only fishermen in sight.

 

"It can get crowded here sometimes, but usually you don't have any trouble finding a place to fish," Chamberlin said. "Ohio has done a great job of providing access to the steelhead streams. They've bought a lot of land to let fishermen get to the water.

 

"That's one of the problems in Pennsylvania. They only have a few miles of shoreline, and most of the streams run through private land. Now farmers there are leasing their (fishing right) to people who can afford to pay $10,000 a year. I don't blame the farmers, but it makes it tough for everybody else."