Fishing Articles — Crappie

The Lost Perch of Erie's Central Basin “For the past three years, the perch fishing has been bad. I’ve been running half the perch trips that I ran four years ago,” said Vitas Kijauskas, Captain of the Cleveland head boat, the Linda Mae. “This past spring looked promising, and then the perch fishing from June through November was dismal.” This has been a common refrain from the perch fishermen in Lake Erie’s central basin. Ohio’s central basin runs from Cranberry Creek, in the west, to the Pennsylvania line, in the east. While the caught perch tend to be huge, their...

Lake Ontario was silky smooth as Captain Frank Campbell slipped the boat into position along a shoreline break. “Uncharacteristically flat for April,” he said. “Boat control won’t be the problem. Let’s see if the fish stayed home in this clear water.” We came to Niagara Falls to drift bait for steelhead in the Niagara River, and maybe drop some spoons on the Niagara Bar for lake trout. But Campbell said we had to spend at least one morning experiencing the pre-spawn smallmouths on the shallow shoals of Lake Ontario. The water temperature read 43°F. After a long, cold winter in...

The boat rounds a corner and the vista of a huge bay opens before us. Crappie world in spring. Here we’ve seen hundreds packed into the spaces between branches of one fallen tree. And we’ve seen thousands in a spot one day only to return the next and find them gone. Happens to anybody who knows crappies for any length of time. Where did they go? The answer is on the screen of the nearest depth finder. Not the structure revealed by sonar. Not the depth, the GPS icons—not even the sidefinder function. The temperature readout. It points directly to...