Lake Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes, and it has spent a long time being apologized for. It caught fire, it grew algae, it got made fun of on television. Meanwhile it quietly became the best walleye water on the planet, and the western basin in September is where that reputation gets earned. The summer boats are gone, the water is cooling off the islands, and the fish that spent August scattered over the open lake start pulling back toward the reefs to eat.
The catch is that they do most of that eating in the dark. A walleye has an eye built for low light, which is where the name comes from, and in clear fall water it would rather not be seen doing anything in the middle of the afternoon. So you launch at six, eat a sandwich while the sun goes down behind the Bass Islands, and set lines right about the time most sensible people are turning on the porch light. Planer boards go out on both sides, each one towing a shallow crankbait a few feet under the surface, and you run the spread slow, barely over a mile an hour, along the edge of a reef that you can only find on the screen.
Watching planer boards at night is its own discipline. Each board carries a small light, and when a fish hits, that light stops tracking with the others and drops back, sometimes a little, sometimes like somebody grabbed it. The captain we fished with called every bite before anyone else saw it, and after an hour it became clear he was not looking at the lights at all. He was listening to the boards chatter in the chop, and he could tell by the sound when one went quiet.
A walleye on a crankbait is not a dramatic fight. It is a steady, head shaking weight that comes in the way a wet towel comes in, and then at the net it remembers who it is and makes one hard run under the boat. We boxed nine between eight and eleven, the biggest a fat twenty seven inch fish with the white tip on the tail and that glassy eye catching the headlamp like a coin at the bottom of a pool. The best bite came in a forty minute window after the wind laid down, and then stopped as if a switch had been thrown.
Running back in at midnight with the lighthouse blinking and the lake gone black and flat, somebody asked why anyone fishes Erie in daylight at all. The captain thought about it for a while, then said the tackle shop is closed at night. That seemed to settle it.
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