COLCHESTER, Ontario — Not too many years ago, Detroit-area anglers fished for walleyes in the Detroit River and Lake Erie through May then moved to Lake St. Clair or changed species. There was little point in fishing the river or Lake Erie after the first week in June because the big fish moved away.

But in the early 1990s, American anglers discovered the great summer walleye fishery on the Canadian shore, and Erieau, Ontario, gained renown as the best place in North America to catch a 10-pound walleye after the Detroit River run ended.

"We'll be fishing walleyes here from now to the middle of July," said Jeff Anderson, who with dad Bill and brother Rob runs Anderson Boyz fishing charters out of this picture-postcard harbor on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie about 25 miles east of Windsor. "Then I'll move to Wheatley, where we'll fish steelhead and walleyes through the middle of August and come back here and fish steelhead through the fall.

"We've been fishing between (Colchester) and Pelee Island. We're getting a lot of fish inshore, but the biggest ones lately have been caught around the island."

Anderson said that while spoons work this time of year, his preference is for bottom bouncers with in-line spinners and night crawlers. The color of the spinner blades hasn't been important, he said, although he prefers that the back side be painted white to increase its visibility underwater.

The day started with a heavy overcast that soon produced a mist that turned into a steady, gentle rain.

Walleye anglers on inland lakes usually like overcast days, because with their large, light-sensitive eyes, walleyes usually are harder to catch when the sun shines. But Anderson said that in the deep, open waters of Lake Erie, "We want sunshine. A chop on the water is nice, but I think that on sunny days they see the (spinner) blades better and are a lot more aggressive."

We were marking fish on the fish-finder screen, but they were biting tentatively. Time after time, a planer board would fall back as a fish grabbed a bait, but when an angler lifted the rod nothing was on the line. Reeling that line in usually found the worm gone or tooth-marked, and more than half of the fish landed were hooked so lightly that the hook fell out of their mouths in the net.

Picking and pecking for four hours, we filled half a cooler with walleyes (and five-pound channel catfish) that came in two sizes — 22- to 24-inchers from the 2003 year class that averaged four pounds, and 18- to 20-inchers from the 2005 year class that went about two pounds (Lake Erie fish grow considerably faster than inland lake walleyes of the same age).

The size of our fish reinforced the findings by biologists that spawning success has been poor for most of the past decade with the exceptions of 2003, which produced one of the record year classes; 2005, which was so-so; and 2007, which was average but whose fish are still under legal size.