Fishing on Lake Erie

Cooler full of walleye

Reeling one in on the Finlander

My dad and a friend of his chartered a fishing boat on Lake Erie one day while we were in town.  In recent years, my dad has become a bit of a fisherman, taking periodic trips up to Northern Michigan to fish for steelhead and salmon, and then scheduling the fly fishing trip in Jackson Hole.  So of course, I was excited to go and see what it was about.

Chartered fishing trips are a little odd, I found out.  It’s certainly fun to catch all those fish, but it was a much less “active” process than fly fishing (my dad confirmed he prefers fly fishing).  The boat captain baited and set the lines (we couldn’t do it because the boat used a complicated system with something like 12 rods at a time), and as the guests on the boat, it was our job to reel the fish in when they bit.  That day, the walleye were biting like crazy.  We hit the catch limit of something like 8 fish per person within the first 1 or 2 hours of the planned 5 hour trip, and it was a blast reeling in fish after fish.  We were back home in time for lunch.

That night, we invited a bunch of family over and cooked a mountain of fish in various ways.  We sauteed them, grilled them on cedar planks, “oven fried” them (the runaway favorite), and prepared them using a few other methods I can’t even remember.  Walleye are very, very delicious.  What an excellent day!