It's not just your eyes playing tricks on you. The steelhead coming into Lake Erie's tributary streams in recent years are smaller than before.
On average, at least.
Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission biologists have been capturing and measuring steelhead caught in a weir at the mouth of Godfrey Run for the last six years. They're noticed the size of the average adult fish has declined by about 2.4 inches over that time, said Chuck Murray, head of the commission's Lake Erie research unit.
Fish 26 to 30 inches are more scarce than they once were, having been replaced by more and more “jacks,” or fish in the 16- to 18-inch range.
The commission's plan is to weigh rather than just measure the fish it handles at Godfrey Run this year to analyze their condition and see if it's just that there are fewer fish older than age 4 or if it's a health issue.
“We're going to try to do a little more investigation,” Murray said.
As for the overall numbers of steelhead returning to the streams each fall, Murray said what anglers have seen in the last few years is likely to be the new norm.
As recently as 2004-05, anglers were landing about 0.6 steelhead per hour, he said. That was at a time when walleye numbers in Lake Erie were at historic lows.
Now, with the population of walleyes — which eat steelhead smolts when they're in Lake Erie — back up, steelhead catch rates have dropped to about 0.3 to 0.4 fish per hour.
“That's probably a more realistic catch rate that we can maintain,” Murray said.
That's still good, he said. That works out to about one steelhead caught for every 2.8 hours of fishing, he said. On the West Coast, in places like Oregon, a good steelhead fishery is one where anglers get one fish for every 20 hours of trying, he added.
— Bob Frye
Wild Outdoors Blog
