Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Lake Metroparks' new Lake Erie fishing pier hooking lots of interest

Painesville Township’s Tim Hickey managed to both catch a very nice Lake Erie steelhead from a new Lake Metroparks project he also did nicely in avoiding being in hot water with his wife.

By catching a chunky five-pound or so steelhead trout from the parks system’s newly constructed (mostly) fishing pier, Hickey took home a prize that kept him in his wife’s good graces.

“My wife said I wasn’t allowed to come home unless I caught a trout,” said a beaming and half-joking Hickey. “Now I don’t have to sleep in my car.”

Hickey was casting a rig consisting of a small jig tipped with several maggots and suspended beneath a foam plastic float. The affair had been launched from Lake Metroparks’ pier, a massive metal “crib” loaded with a quarry of heavy rocks and superimposed with a concrete deck. The pier also features a couple of picnic tables, sheltering awning, and a system of heavy-gauge tubing that serves as guardrails along with some signage.

The pier juts 200 feet into Lake Erie and is located at the end of Hardy Road and terminating at Painesville Township Park. The 37-acre park is owned by the township but the whole kit-and-caboodle is managed by Lake Metroparks under a 25-year lease agreement.

Lake Metroparks has completed the three-year pier project; an object of studies, wading through the required governmental red tape and squirreling away about $2.5 million in funding. It was paid for by Lake County property taxpayers, of whom Hickey happily says he is one.

“The pier has turned out really, really nice,” Hickey said. “It’s so cool to see our tax dollars being spent so well. Lake Metroparks always gets our family’s ‘yes’ vote at levy time.”

The pier is actually just one component of the parks system’s efforts to shore up the 100-year-old park. A complex component, to be sure, as a lot of forethought went into designing and building its superstructure and associated land-based erosion control edifice, says Lake Metroparks’ executive director Paul Palagyi.

Basically, said Palagyi, the pier consists of a steel basket into which contains huge rocks. As Lake Erie tries to punish the pier’s superstructure the water runs through the crib and the waves’ energy is defused. It’s a much better design concept than using steel bulkheads which are not always successful in standing up to the pounding of Lake Erie’s oft-times powerful waves, Palagyi says.

“This design is intended to extend the life of the pier and I doubt that any of us will ever live long enough to see the day come when it is destroyed,” Palagyi said.

Left in place just to east of the new pier – and now largely ignored – is a several generations-old concrete model that had always attracted steelhead, bass and walleye anglers but was never easily accessible.

“We left it there because, quite frankly, it would have been too costly to remove,” Palagyi said.

Palagyi said as for the new pier project, it was broken down into two phases with the first one costing $619,000 and included the 800 feet of reinforced shoreline protection. The second phase cost $1.9 million and featured the specially designed and built pier and its appointments as well as landscaping the park’s slope, adding steps and a switchback paved path for handicap accessible vehicles.

While the bulk of the bill was footed by Lake County property owners, Painesville Township’s park board does kick in several hundred thousand dollars annually to help offset maintenance costs, Palagyi says as well.

“There are not too many locations anywhere along Lake Erie where persons with mobility issues can access as good a fishing hole as this pier provides,” Palagyi said.

For anglers, the new pier represents perhaps one of the finest public fishing platforms between Cleveland and Conneaut. Make that “free” public fishing platform as the parks system will allow no-charge angling access 24/7 to anyone and everyone and not just for Lake County residents.

“Really, you cannot find a better strategically placed shore access site for walleye and steelhead fishing,” Palagyi said. “The fish like to cruise the shoreline and will swim right alongside the pier’s two faces. The pier is right in the middle of it all.”

Indeed, while fishing any pier is often times best right at its nose, the pier extends into water deep enough that trout, smallmouth bass and walleye can be caught – and are being caught – throughout its entire 200 foot length.

At the pier’s end anglers may be fishing water that’s 10 or 12 feet deep but even where the structure edges the shoreline the water’s depth is still several feet deep: and is situated in such a way that various sport fish species that love rocks will be available to anglers, Palagyi says.

Also, some 15 lights run the pier’s length, offering plenty of illumination to tie on lures or rig baits. And if that’s too much artificial daylight all an angler has to do is cover a light with a sweatshirt, Palagyi says.

And because the rather longish Grand River west breakwater at the mouth of the stream is about two miles to the west, sand migration is essentially halted. That means the lake’s ground floor extending out from the park and its pier are an amalgam of stone, rock and boulders with little in the way or either sand or mud.

“Perfect fish habitat,” Palagyi said.

Of important note is that the pier’s deck does ride about 10 feet above the lake’s surface. Add another three feet for the wrap-around steel tube railing and it’s a bit of a drop to retrieve a caught fish.

No problem as anglers found solutions even before the park’s official dedication October 17th.

Some anglers have discovered the so-called “pier nets” popularized by fishers working the Atlantic Ocean’s string of fishing piers. Without going into too much detail, such a device consists of large-diameter landing net material stretched over a metal hoop and suspended by three chains that are attached to a small ring and from which is tied a lengthy piece of rope.

Drop the affair over the pier’s side and let it sink a ways, slide a caught fish over the enveloping net and raise the whole shebang.

The alternative is that some anglers are using home-brewed handle extensions of either PVC piping or aluminum and figuring how best to incorporate a way to take down the unit into a truck-manageable length.

While the pier will be shut down during dangerous late fall through early spring weather, should a temporary reprieve appear the parks system will simply open the gates until the nasty stuff returns, Palagyi says.

Palagyi says also that though the pier was designed in large measure with anglers in mind they are not by any means the only ones welcome. The pier will offer outstanding evening sunset viewing and will prove to be an exceptional birding location as waterfowl in huge flights often pass close to shore at lake surface heights.

“We have more than a few eagles in the neighborhood, too,” Palagyi said.

But don’t think that these pursuit seekers are going to be squeezed out by people wanting to turn the pier into a reserved private party venue. That’s not going to happen on his watch, says Palagyi.

“We’ve all ready turned down requests to reserve the pier,” he said. “Hey, if a party wants to host a wedding on the pier that’s fine. The bride is just going to have understand that she may be standing next to a fishing rig with a night crawler on it.”

- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischk@Ameritech.net


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