People who have only fished salt water assume the Great Lakes are lakes. They are not. They are oceans that got landlocked somewhere around the last ice age and have never once accepted the ruling. Lake Erie in particular has the temperament of a much larger body of water and the walleye population of a place that knows it.
We launched out of a western-basin ramp at an hour that does not deserve a name, into that flat green-brown chop that looks harmless in photographs and rearranges your cooler in person. The crew was two brothers-in-law with thirty years of unresolved tactical differences and one aluminum boat between them. Roy runs crawler harnesses on bottom bouncers, slow, low, dragging the gravel like a man looking for his keys. Dale runs crankbaits behind planer boards, fast and wide, covering water like he is being timed.
For three hours the lake declined to take a side. Roy dragged. Dale trolled. The two of them conducted the entire argument at a volume best described as "for the benefit of neighboring boats," while a freighter went by on the horizon at the speed of a decision nobody wanted to make.
Then both rods went at once. Not near each other, one on the bouncer, one on the outside board, at the same instant, as if the lake had simply gotten tired of the noise. What came over the rail was a matched pair of walleye, gold-flanked and glass-eyed, close enough in length that we measured twice and then, wisely, stopped measuring. Roy said the fish proved his point. Dale said the fish proved his point. Both of them were, for the only time on record, entirely correct.
They shook hands over the cooler. It lasted until the ramp. The Great Lakes settle nothing permanently, they just occasionally issue a stay of proceedings, gold-plated, in about eighteen feet of water. We keep both rigs in the boat now, which is either diplomacy or cowardice, and out there they are the same thing.