By bits and
pieces, trial and error, Ohio’s steelhead program has proven itself in the
hearts and minds of tens of thousands of anglers.
Tumbling
down the rabbit hole first by stocking coho salmon into a couple of Lake Erie
tributaries in Northeast Ohio during the late 1960s and up until 1988, the Ohio
Department of Natural Resources then hitched its wagon to the Chinook salmon
for one decade.
When the
agency saw that king salmon returns were no better than they were for coho
salmon, the Wildlife Division also began to augment the program by pouring young
brown trout into other Lake Erie tributaries, all of which were also located in
Northeast Ohio.
Somewhere
along that rabbit hole fall a light bulb went off and the Wildlife Division’s
fisheries section hit on the idea of stocking rainbow trout, a.k.a., steelhead
trout.
“I’m proud
of the fact that Ohio became the first Great Lakes state to stock steelhead
only,” said Phil Hillman, fisheries management administrator for the Wildlife
Division’s Northeast Ohio office in Akron.
Hillman made
his scientific-based observations – both technical and anecdotal – during the
annual Lake County Outdoor Writers Fish Camp. Hosted by the Lake County
Visitors Bureau and Lake Metroparks the quarter-century-old Fish Camp is an
annual coming together of writers and guests to experience first-hand the
Wildlife Division’s highly successful and enormously popular steelhead-fishing
program.
Tinkering
even further the Wildlife Division abandoned stocking trout raised at its
London (Ohio) hatchery and instead began obtaining steelhead eggs from
Michigan.
Specifically
these eggs are obtained still from fish captured from Michigan’s Little
Manistee River, a Lake Michigan tributary. Michigan sets up its trout-catching
weir sometime in early March, strips the females of its eggs, keeps a goodly
number for itself and pawns the rest to Ohio and Indiana.
These eggs
have been – and are still being - hatched out of the state’s cold-water
Castalia Fish Hatchery near Sandusky.
This new
breed of steelhead trout and subsequent management strategy became a watershed,
eureka, moment for the Wildlife Division’s cold-water, Lake Erie tributary
trout stocking/fishing program.
And the cost
to raise these trout for stocking purposes is one-tenth that for muskies: $1
per fish for the former and $10 per fish for the latter, Hillman says.
And to think
the state’s nearly 50-year-old salmonid program began because then Ohio
Governor James A. Rhodes bled scarlet-and-gray.
“Governor
Rhodes ordered the Division to begin stocking cohos because Michigan was
stocking cohos into Lake Michigan,” said a chuckling Hillman.
Hillman said
also that Ohio is “in the same ballpark with all of the other states in terms
of the catch rates for steelhead trout.”
“We’ve seen
a two- to three-fold increase in fishing pressure with the catch rates also going
up,” Hillman told the outdoor writers. “And we’ve seen anglers from nearly every
other state come here specifically for steelhead, including anglers from
Montana and Texas.”
That highly
evolved catch rate likewise has spawned a locally brewed growth industry annually
worth tens of millions of dollars.
So too has
the program led to the development of various fishing clubs and organizations
that champion the Wildlife Division’s steelhead program.
Such groups
as the Ohio Central Basin Steelheaders arose due to the program. Meanwhile, the
Eastlake-based Chagrin River Salmon Association retained the program’s historic
salmon roots while it grew into a club that’s embraced the Little Manistee
strain of steelhead trout.
So
successful is Ohio’s steelhead program and its hatchery system that Ohio State
Auditor’s research says the job cannot be done better privately, Hillman says.
Likewise,
says Hillman, other states have begun to emulate the Ohio Division of Wildlife’s
program, hoping to score similar praise.
A good chunk
of Ohio’s success at its grow-stock-catch steelhead program rests on the broad
shoulders of the state’s anglers themselves, notes Hillman.
Angler
surveys note that steelhead anglers by and large have clutched the two-fish-per
person-per-day creel limit so close to their fishing vests that estimates point
to a return rate of 90 percent.
Further,
says Hillman, the fishery is self-regulating to some degree. It doesn’t take
much for a steelhead angler to withdraw his cell phone and report a
trout-fishing violation to the Wildlife Division, says Hillman.
Which is in
sharp contrast to what is often the case with the Maumee River run of walleye
that seems to draw out the worst in some anglers, Hillman says as well.
What lies
ahead this year for stocking steelhead trout is the insertion of up to 425,000
trout – each measuring six to nine inches long and called “smolts” – into five
Lake Erie tributaries: The Chagrin, Grand and Rocky rivers (about 90,000 fish
each), the Vermillion River (about 55,000 fish), and Conneaut Creek (about
75,000 fish with the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission stocking another approximately
75,000 fish measuring six to eight inches each into its stretch of this
stream).
That some of
these fishes will stray into such non-stocked streams as the Ashtabula River
along with Cowles, Wheeler, Arcola creeks and other small Lake Erie tributaries
helps demonstrate that Ohio’s steelhead fisheries program remains an “imperfect”
one, says Hillman.
And that
so-named imperfection is complicated by several other factors that range from
possible climate change conditions to the most feared of all, the persistence of
the sea lamprey.
This nasty
parasitic creature lives quietly in certain Lake Erie tributary streams until
adulthood when it then migrates into Lake Erie. Once there an adult sea lamprey-
which can grow to nearly three feet in length - becomes a horror of a freak
show, an organism that can kill up to 40 pounds worth of host fish.
Yet while
eradication is virtually impossible for several reasons, international efforts
continue to try and minimize the threat, Hillman says, noting that tributaries
of various Lake Erie and the other four Great Lakes stream are treated with a
chemical to kill the sea lamprey’s larval stage.
Of growing concern,
however, is that scientific evidence is suggesting that the sea lamprey’s
ramped up population may be due to spawning occurring in both the Detroit River
as well as Conneaut Creek, says Hillman as well.
Even so and
while Ohio’s steelhead program continues to see prickly problems such as the
intrusion of the irksome sea lamprey, the successes are more than keeping one
step ahead in the game.
And to think
the program’s genesis was kicked started by a governor who just could not
stomach having Michigan win the game of one-upmanship.
By Jeffrey
L. Frischkorn
Jeff is the retired
News-Herald reporter who covered the earth sciences, the area's three
county park systems and the outdoors for the newspaper. During his 30 years
with The News-Herald Jeff was the recipient of more than 100 state, regional
and national journalism awards. He also is a columnist and features writer for
the Ohio Outdoor News, which is published every other week and details the outdoors
happenings in the state
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