According to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Wildlife, populations of Lake Erie walleye, yellow perch and smallmouth bass are in good shape.

Recently I spoke with the Ohio DOW’s Jeff Tyson, who supervises the agency’s Lake Erie Research Station in Sandusky. This interview, conducted last winter, reflected the state of the walleye, yellow perch and smallmouth bass fisheries, based on the best information available at that time.

“Obviously, our fisheries are strongly driven by weather patterns and water quality related conditions,” Tyson noted. “If we have good water setup and good weather, folks can get out on actively feeding pods of fish and have some really good days. We have a really nice size distribution of fish, including a good opportunity to catch large ones like 28 inch walleyes.”

The outlook for walleye is a good one. Anglers should be able to tap into walleyes from at least three different age groups this summer.

This year is looking very similar to what we saw in 2012,” Tyson explained. “We’ll have a number of younger fish. 2007 and 2010 were about average year classes. Those will contribute to the fishery. We started seeing some of the 2010’s last year, showing up over the 15 inch minimum size limit. And we’ll still have a fair number of the 2003 fish, which was the large hatch we had.”

During the early spring of 2012, anglers were shocked by the extraordinary number of dead walleyes that washed ashore in the western basin. At the time, officials felt the event was a result of the conditions, and wouldn’t have a substantial impact on the year’s fishing, both of which proved to be true.

“We felt the reason we may have had a more significant die-off in 2012 was due to the weather patterns we had,” Tyson said. “There was a significant winter kill of gizzard, that and white perch. We had a miserable spring. So due to the conditions those walleyes were pretty beat around.

“By the post-spawn they were in rough shape. That fishery preformed relatively well. We attribute that to the fact we have several year classes of fish out there, including the 2003 year class. We are harvesting right around a million walleyes out of our waters. So it was right on par with where we’ve been, within of course the constraints of the weather.

“In 2011, the fishery didn’t produce well, but due to the weather people couldn’t get out and fish. It was a miserable year,” he added.

Yellow perch are an extremely popular fish with Lake Erie anglers. Even on days when walleyes are being tight lipped, or difficult to locate, anglers can typically catch enough perch to keep them happy. As has been the case in recent years, the outlook is a solid one for yellow perch.

“Yellow perch populations will also be similar to what we saw last year,” Tyson reported. “The numbers increase as you move east in the lake. We have decent numbers of perch in the western end, but numbers aren’t as great as we’d like them to be.

“But that seems to be fairly typical of the perch population on the west end of the lake. As you move east, into the central basin, you start to see more robust populations of yellow perch.”

Whereas walleye and yellow perch are “meat fish,” appealing to an angler’s desire to put food on the table as much as the sport they provide, the attractiveness of smallmouth bass has more to do with the deep bend they put in the rod. And on Erie, also, the impressive size they attain.

Though certainly not in any sort of collapse, the smallie picture had been down of late, at least when compared to the world-class fishery folks had become accustomed to. A lot of the blame has been pointed at the invasive species, the round goby, and its egg robbing tendencies. Fortunately, the tide may have turned for brown bass.

“We have some assessment programs in place to try to better determine the impact of the catch-and-immediate release spring season that we instituted back in 2004,” Tyson noted. “What we are seeing, population wise, is we’re getting fairly decent hatches for smallmouth bass.

“Our adult index data suggests that in fact the age distribution of our fish is improving. So we’re seeing some younger year classes come into the fishery, which is a good thing.

“Our bottom trawler assessment surveys, where we drag a trawler along the bottom to assess young fish abundance, 2010 and 2012, it appears we had pretty good hatches of bass. It is progressively getting better than that of the mid to late 1990s,” Tyson added.

Jeff Knapp is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle