For most anglers, late summer on Lake Erie means walleyes, yellow perch, steelhead and smallmouth bass on humps and ridges found in deeper water.

An added attraction this summer has been the excellent, if somewhat limited, largemouth bass fishery in the lake.

Last week, my frequent fishing partner, Dave Lehman, invited me to fish Lake Erie and Presque Isle Bay with him.

Though Lehman and I often share a boat, it had been a couple of months since we had fished the waters of Erie together. Dave, though, fishes both the lake and the bay on a weekly basis.

On the drive up he gave me an update.

"I've been getting some nice smallmouth on larger humps found in 40-some feet of water," he reported. "The bay has been producing good numbers of largemouth. A lot of them are in the 14- to 16-inch range — nice fat fish."

"And, lately, we've been pulling largemouth over 3 pounds out of the bay's weeds on most trips. But what's been most interesting is the largemouth we are catching out in the lake. Last week I caught a 4 pounder out there."

After launching Dave's boat at the City of Erie's Chestnut Street ramp, we skimmed across the bay, idled through the channel and were off to one of his deeper smallmouth humps in the main lake.

With the sandy Presque Isle peninsula to our west, Lehman located the spot on his GPS and dropped a marker on the structure's northern tip. Then we motored to the southern end of the structure and allowed the light south wind to push us slowly across the hump, which came up to about 36 feet while being surrounded by 45 feet of water. He used a bow-mount troll motor to keep us on a line with the buoy.

As Dave had expected, we caught smallmouth bass up to 4Z\x pounds during our drift, fish that hit Hopkins jigging spoons.

A few bonus rock bass added to the action, as did several 5- to 7-pound drum, which are strong fighters but a species regarded by many as a nuisance fish.

Since we wanted to fish a variety of structures on the lake and still have time to poke around Presque Isle Bay's weeds for largemouths, we soon headed toward shore for a crack at a couple of shallow humps: rocky structures that come to within 15 feet or so of the surface while dropping into about 20 feet of water.

During the spring and early summer, these humps attract large numbers of smallmouth bass. But during these late summer forays, these areas have attracted largemouths.

With the edge of the structure marked, we began fishing small plastic worms on drop-shot rigs, casting the rigs out on the hump and slowly dragging them back to the deeper water.

It wasn't long until Lehman set the hook into a 2Z\x-pound largemouth, a fish that quickly showed its identity when it cleared the lake's surface. We took several other nice bass, both largemouth and smallmouth, before leaving the area.

The extent of Erie's largemouth bass fishery would be a guess at this point. Since we were fishing an area just a few miles east of the bay mouth, it makes sense to think the fish migrated into the lake from the bay, perhaps following bait. But we also caught very small largemouths, as in about 3 inches long — fingerling-stage bass, which would suggest they were hatching in the lake.

Origin aside, the presence of largemouth bass on Lake Erie's shallow humps hints at yet another angling option on a lake that already provides diverse angling opportunities.

Jeff Knapp is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle.