GREAT OUTDOORS: Derby hopefuls compete with shad for walleye

The end of the month marks the conclusion of the Fall Brawl and Walleye Slam fishing derbies, which present fully equipped fishing boats to the registered anglers who enters the heaviest walleye. The biggest walleyes are often caught in the waning days of the contest as anglers target fish that have been fattening for weeks on gizzard shad during their fall feeding frenzies.Lately, the tournament period has been vexed by high winds that have triggered large waves, making participation on the lake with small vessels and even shore casting unsafe in some locations. Although the derby boundaries extend well into the Central Basin, the epicenter of fishing activity typically occurs in an area between the Western and Central basins, called the Sandusky Sub-Basin. It is a roughly diamond-shaped bowl bordered to the west by the Marblehead to Pelee Columbus limestone ridge; south of Pelee Island; along the Ohio shoreline from Sandusky to Lorain; and the Pelee-Lorain sand ridge to the east. Here, millions of young-of-year gizzard shad, which are a walleye's favorite prey this time of year and normally the most numerous fish in the lake, gather in astronomical schools. As this warm-water fish species struggles to survive in cold conditions, they make easy prey as they flounder in death throes this time of the year.By some estimates, as many as 95% of young-of-year shad die when temperatures fall below 39 degrees in Lake Erie and throughout their northern range. Gizzard shad wreaked havoc at the electrical generating stations along the shoreline before they were taken out of service. The Bayshore Power Plant in Oregon and Edgewater Power Plant in Lorain were inundated with massive schools of shad that took refuge during cold weather in their warm-water discharge plumes and sometimes charged toward their water intakes. Even in weak current, the lethargic fish were sucked against (impinged) rotating "traveling" screens designed to keep fish, driftwood and other "trash" away from electrical production machinery.If the traveling screens became clogged, water could dam up behind them and starve the condensers. On-site crews hosed off screens into the discharge canal flushing into Maumee Bay to prevent this from happening.My first non-paper route job was helping Ohio State University document the fish species and numbers impacted by Toledo Edison's Bayshore Power Plant on Maumee Bay.Gizzard shad made up 64% of the nearly 18 million fish impinged there from September 1976 to September 1977.The worst one-day fish run during the study occurred on December 15, 1976, when an estimated 506,112 fish weighing 5,371 pounds were impinged, with gizzard shad comprising 62% of them by weight.At Edgewater, Ohio Edison had to haul them away in garbage trucks to landfills because their discharge area was not as convenient.During one winter, they had commercial fishermen seine them; hauled to a local fish processor; grinded; loaded in plastic bags; frozen; and shipped in a refrigerated semi-trailer to allow sport fishermen in the Florida Keys to test their effectiveness as chum blocks.They proved to be very effective at attracting saltwater game fish, but the netters would only agree to catch the shad if Ohio Edison agreed to pay them in addition to giving them free access to the bait to sell to an eager market, which ended the brief partnership.The power plant has since closed and been dismantled and without the warm-water discharge, the shad densities have diminished there.My advice to the derby anglers is to match the hatch by using shad-shaped crank baits.