Anglers dismayed by last season’s tough fishing on Lake Erie will be happy to know that prospects look good for this year’s sport.

Paul Bierer is representative of many anglers who had a tough time on Erie last year, particularly in the western basin. Bierer makes regular expeditions to his lakeside retreat near Port Clinton.

“The spring walleye fishing was very slow,” Bierer recalled. “We only caught a handful of walleyes the whole spring. That seemed to be pretty much the norm for everybody.

“The weather was bad. The spring was cold. The water level was a foot to 18 inches higher than normal throughout the summer. In the spring the water was muddy. Then in summer there was a bad algae bloom.”

Travis Hartman, an Ohio DNR fisheries biologist stationed at the agency’s Sandusky Fisheries Research Unit, feels the poor fishing experienced by many Erie anglers last year is not indicative of the fish populations found there, despite a well-publicized fish kill during the spring.

“From what we looked at the fish kill was in the thousands, though not tens-of-thousands,” Hartman said. “In a smaller system that would have been an extremely high number. But on Erie, thankfully, most likely we were just looking at a normal spring spawning mortality.

“The reason last year was different was, since the water stayed cold so long, fish that succumbed to spawning mortality sat down there and didn’t decompose. When it did warm up, the air bladders filled up and the fish floated to the surface.

“We really believe it was just a case of being able to see it (the spawning die-off) when we normally don’t. It does occur every year. The conditions arose, unfortunately, that we got to see it last year. Most likely, the die-off didn’t affect the fishing, since it was what we’d normally expect from a spawning mortality,” Hartman added.

The blue-green algae Bierer took note of was indeed a serious problem last summer, creating widespread blooms that affected significant areas of the western basin. It’s an ongoing problem that both the private and public sectors are struggling with to understand and deal with. Conditions were ripe last year for algae production.

“Last year all of the worst circumstances lined up,” Hartman explained. “We had, by most accounts, the highest amounts of rainfall we’ve ever had. A lot of the cities along the lakeshore, Cleveland, Toledo, recorded their highest levels of precipitation in a year that we’ve ever recorded. So there was a lot of nutrient input from the tributaries. The conditions were there for that algae bloom to happen.”

The clean-up efforts that helped clean Lake Erie from the nutrient levels present back in the 1960s and ‘70s focused on untreated sewage, particularly that brought in from major rivers like the Detroit and Maumee.

What’s challenging about today’s situation is that while point-source pollution sources such as sewage discharge continues to be a factor, non-point sources like that from agricultural practices is much tougher to control.

“Politically, it’s a hot issue right now, with the blooms of last year,” Hartman noted. “That put this situation on a lot of radars. So we’re looking at a lot of different options. The bottom line is that we’re dealing with non-point source rather than point source pollution back in the 60s and 70s when we had point sources to correct.

“It’s pretty safe to say we have to change the nutrient load, to alter the amount of phosphorus and the type of phosphorus coming into the lake. But that’s a battle that’s going to have to be fought on a lot of fronts. Time will tell how effective we’ll be.”

With Lake Erie considered by many as the walleye capital of the world, anglers will be happy to know there should be plenty of fish available this year.

“We heard a lot of negativity the past year,” Hartman admitted. “2011 was obviously a poor year. We had bad environmental conditions. Everything lined up to lead to bad fishing last year. I think people are going to be surprised how good the walleye fishing is this year if the weather’s decent.”

The spring of 2003 produced one of the largest spawns ever recorded. In a system where strong year classes are the exception rather than the rule, those fish have helped drive the walleye fishery for the past six or seven years. As harvest and natural mortality claim those nine year old ‘eyes it begs the question, “are there walleyes out there to fill in the void?”

“One of the better year classes since 2003 is the 2007 year class,” Hartman noted. “2007 supported a lot of the harvest last season, and that will continue again this year. In addition to that, I think we’ll begin to see contributions from the 2010 class. We did our annual fall gillnet survey last fall and we caught a lot of 2010 fish that were already approaching, or even exceeded, 15 inches.

“Since there’s not a lot of competition from other year classes around them, they are really growing fast, faster than the normal growth patterns on Lake Erie. With the 2003 fish, they really weren’t harvestable until 2006, because there was so many of them they grew slower than normal. I think there is going to be a lot of walleyes from the 2010 class taken from Erie this summer.”