Cutbank

ODDLY RHOMBOID FINE-GRIT SANDPAPER

The city of Buffalo, NY, on the horizon displays a bit of the Rust Belt’s industrial past.
“Growing up near the eastern shore of Lake Erie, my life has always been intertwined with its waters. In my earliest years it was gathering crayfish and scuds to inspect and release, later on were mornings on gramp’s boat catching bucketloads of perch, and eventually in my early 20s I moved on to discover the lake’s impressive smallmouth bass and lake-run rainbow populations. The memories seem to go on forever. Here, the city of Buffalo, NY, on the horizon displays a bit of the Rust Belt’s industrial past.” Photo: Joe Janiak
Words: Matt Dunn

I picked up a walleye fishing habit by accident, like chewing tobacco in middle school. I bought a deep-V tiller boat to flyfish for musky on my local lake and to fish jigs and jerk baits for smallmouth on Lake Erie, but now walleye consume most of my time in July and August when everything else is too hot and too low and I can troll the glassed-out big lake after work in the sun drinking beer and listening to the Phillies radio call and bring home a couple fish to fry. The walleye are 50 feet down near the thermocline and while I do have plenty of fast-sinking lines, it’s hardly a fun way to flyfish. 

The best opportunity to flyfish for walleye in my part of Lake Erie is usually in May when the nearshore water warms into the 50s and everything that swims can be taken in 10 to 15 feet of water over the shale slabs and rubble that litter the U.S. side of the eastern basin in front of eroding bluff shorelines. The lake is almost never glassed out in May, so the hardest thing is knowing when to go. One-foot waves on Lake Erie are not the placid broadly rolling swells of the salty sea. They are relentless, steep-sided, short-period back breakers, surprisingly painful, like the full grasping pinch of a toddler, the kind of small-D energy that only something called an “inland sea” could have.

Back to Issue 17.4