If you've fished Lake Erie for walleyes over the last couple of years, by now you've discovered that the fishery has been experiencing incredible gains. Both numbers of walleyes and their sizes just keep going up.

Today, most Buckeye State anglers would have to reach far back in their memories to find a time when Lake Erie walleyes were this large, healthy and prolific. Just a few years ago, in fact, catching a limit of Lake Erie walleyes was an accomplishment to brag about. Often the feat took all day, and many fish barely made the legal size limit. Nowadays, anglers often catch their limits in just a few hours, and their average fish will often be somewhere around 24 inches and 4 pounds in weight.

Sometimes this can be greatly exceeded. For example, on a walleye outing last June, I boated five fish in three hours. That is noteworthy in itself. However, two of the fish were just shy of 32 inches.

Two others were 27 inches, and the smallest was 23 inches. My limit of fish weighed over 43 pounds!

Two friends I was fishing with did just as well. All month, we periodically harvested limits of walleyes, always with fish over 28 inches, thus meeting the minimum requirement for Fish Ohio Certification.

With walleye fishing this incredible, most Lake Erie anglers are asking, "How long this can go on?"

As with everything in life, there has to be a low to match the high.

Where -- and how far down -- that bottom will be in the next few years is determined by many different factors, some of which are beyond our control.

In fact, whether or not we will have a bottom is unclear.

For now, however, it's clear that Lake Erie is in a peak or approaching one, and Ohio's walleye anglers may never have as great a chance at catching large numbers of trophy-caliber fish as they do right now.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Narrowing down the complicated list of events and circumstance that have brought us today's incredible Lake Erie walleye fishery is hard, with many different factors having varying influences.

A major component is the research conducted by Lake Erie biologists for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources' Wildlife Division. The fish research facilities in Sandusky and Fairport head up this research, using a variety of tools. They combine creel reports, sample netting and tagging to get accurate reflections of what's going on beneath Lake Erie's waters.

The number of fish in a creel report or net sample tells them some things. But by taking scale samples and sizes, biologists can build an accurate picture of the overall population.

From this and other information, they can extrapolate such things as yearly hatch rates and survival rates, which they then use to adjust fishing regulations to preserve the fishery's long-term sustainability.

Years ago, regulations were put in place that lowered the limit on walleye catches from March 1 through April 30. These limits were intended to lower the numbers of walleyes taken during their critical spawning period. Today, that limit is four.

Research conducted by Lake Erie biologists set the foundation for these regulations. Because of the increased vulnerability of fish concentrated on their spawning grounds, it was determined that limits needed to be imposed to protect them.

Sound simple? Not quite! These regulations, stemming from the same research, put into place the final major components that changed Lake Erie into a walleye angler's paradise.