Presque Isle Paradise
Formed as Lake Erie levels slowly rose between 12,000 and 3,500 years ago, Presque Isle peninsula is a dynamic interface of land and water in constant evolution. It was formed when a large glacier retreated south into the valley now occupied by Lake Erie, leaving behind a ridge of sediment called a moraine. As lake levels continued to rise and cut bluffs along the shore, newly eroded sand was moved by wind and currents, which deposited the material into a seven-mile-long, 32,000-acre sand peninsula near Erie, Pennsylvania.
Presque Isle became a Pennsylvania state park in 1921 and in some years gets 4 million visitors, rivaling Yellowstone National Park. It sounds like a crowded fishing destination but most of these people are beachgoers visiting during the heat of summer. Fly fishers are just starting to discover the great fishing here.
Presque Isle peninsula extends to the northeast from Lake Erie’s south shore and forms a large, sheltered bay. On the south side of the bay is the city of Erie. On the north side of the bay, inside the peninsula, is a network of smaller bays and lagoons that provide diverse scenery and fly-fishing opportunities. These bays and lagoons offer ideal habitat, feeding, and spawning grounds in the spring for North America’s most revered warmwater gamefish.
The shallow waters of Presque Isle Bay warm quickly after ice-out, attracting feeding and spawning fish from Lake Erie. Mid-April through mid-July usually provides the best fishing until soaring water temperatures drive fish deep or back into Lake Erie. An early morning and evening largemouth bite keeps the fishery active through the summer until the cooling effects of fall once again turns on other species like pike and muskie. Surprisingly, smallmouth bass do not re-enter the bay in large numbers at this time.
Presque Isle Bay has miles of wading on clear, hard-bottom sand flats. Many of the two- to four-foot-deep flats throughout the bay are adjacent to ideal fish-holding structure and drop-offs ranging from 5 to 20 feet deep. These drop-offs often correlate with weed lines and weedbed flats. Within the flats are well-defined troughs, channels, depressions, potholes, rock, rubble, breakwater structures, sunken trees, gravel bottoms, and wind-created currents—good habitat for bass.
The Fish
Largemouth bass. The spring largemouth fishery depends on the timing of ice-out but normally begins in mid to late April when the cottonwood trees are starting to bud on the peninsula and water temperatures reach the mid to upper 50s. Days with stable warming trends and plenty of sunshine bring the largemouth up from their winter haunts seeking warmer water temperatures. Shallow, north-side, dark-bottom areas within the bay heat up first and pull in fish during the early part of spring. The western end or head of the bay, Horseshoe Pond that feeds Misery Bay, the lagoons, and Marina Bay are good places to start searching for Presque Isle potbellies weighing from 4 to 6 pounds.
Bass blitzes add to the excitement throughout spring and summer with anywhere from 5 to 50 fish blowing up on bait, notably emerald shiners. Most of the fish are small 1- and 2-pound “schoolie” largemouth, but you can drum up 4-pounders that are underneath the small guys by fishing larger poppers or by letting an Emerald Candy or Clouser Deep Minnow sink below the activity. You must get your fly into the activity quickly before they move, which most blitzing fish do. Certain areas where different habitat edges and currents converge can bring up fish consistently.
The lagoons and smaller bays fish well for largemouth into late June when most fish drop back into larger bays like Misery and deeper main bay weed lines when the water warms. I’ve also had excellent largemouth fishing along the outer north-side beaches throughout the summer, sight-casting to cruising fish that seek the cooler water of the big lake and feed on roaming schools of bait. The sandy shoreline of Lake Erie looks more like an Atlantic coastline and makes an unlikely spot to find bass, but if you find the bait, the fish will be nearby.
Smallmouth bass. My favorite fish on Presque Isle Bay are the smallmouth that migrate into the bay in late April and early May when warming waters attract the bait. The average fly-caught smallmouth weighs an honest 3 pounds, and 4- to 5-pound fish are possible.
The bay warms quickly and starts a chain reaction that puts bass on a feeding binge. Smelt that entered in the winter still linger, emerald shiners and gizzard shad can amass by the thousands, small yellow perch are plentiful, and recently stocked steelhead smolts school and enter the bay before the summer’s heat sends them back out into the lake. Steelhead smolts were actually stocked in the bay at one time, and the thousands exiting local tributaries quickly find their way there, providing a unique forage base to imitate. Smallmouth bass take advantage of all this food, and patterns imitating the prevalent baitfish can score big. One of my main patterns is an Emerald Candy, inspired by the popular saltwater pattern, the Surf Candy. It imitates the emerald shiner, one of the most prolific baitfish species on Lake Erie and Presque Isle Bay, which often travel in huge schools.
Another important baitfish is the round goby, an invasive species from the Caspian Sea. Biologists with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources now say that gobies can make up to 70 percent of a smallmouth’s diet throughout the year on Lake Erie. That data is hard to ignore, and a goby imitation should be in every Great Lakes basin fly box. They have a prominent black spot on the dorsal fin and range in color from a light gray to a dark mottled brown and jet-black when spawning. Gobies do not have air bladders to keep them suspended, so they dart around tight to the bottom. Even with large lead eyes, goby patterns should be heavily weighted along the shank. Gobies are all head with slender tails.
Early spring smallmouth stage deep in 8 to 20 feet of water near the mouth of Misery Bay and the shipping channel going out into Lake Erie. We used to be able to wade onto the big sandbar south of Perry’s Monument at this intersection and fish to the bass with sinking lines, but higher than normal lake water kept us from doing so this past spring, and we used pontoon boats and float tubes instead.
Smallmouth spread throughout the entire bay as water temperatures reach the high 50s, moving up to the 8-foot drop and first weed line from shore, which is easily reached by wading along most main bay flats on the south side of the peninsula. Smallmouth can be found in shallow water much sooner then most anglers think, moving up on flats from 3 to 8 feet deep during stable weather, hunting schools of baitfish in packs like wolves. This is the time to take smallmouth on top.
Smallmouth are in the bay to eat and spawn. Even though Pennsylvania regulations allow you to keep one “trophy” fish before the regular bass season opens, all fish should be released to ensure that the fishery continues. Smallmouth leave the bay and return to the lake by late June or early July.
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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