Once a commercial footnote, walleye now being touted as Ohio's state fish

Context isn’t much a requisite in a realm of limitless amusements, and western Lake Erie rates as the handiest Xanadu on Ohio’s pleasure-dome portfolio.

Pointedly, promoters who don’t employ enthusiasm generally aren’t employed long.

In a roomful of people important and people not so much, depending on the measurer, Larry Fletcher, president of the Lake Erie tourism marketer Shores & Island Ohio, pitched Tuesday for passage of a pending bill that would make walleye the state fish.

Walleye grow most famously in Lake Erie among Ohio’s waters, though perhaps that’s the point. The lake’s designation decades ago as the walleye capital of the world sustains one of the state’s enduring touristy advertising slogans.

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Doing the ceremonial catching of Fletcher’s pitching were self-proclaimed big fans of the great lake, including Gov. Mike DeWine, Lt. Gov. John Husted, director of natural resources Mary Mertz and wildlife division chief Kendra Wecker.

The occasion was the 44th annual Governor’s Lake Erie Fish Ohio Day, built decades ago at least partly on enthusiasm and based these days at the Welcome Center on the road to Cheese Haven and to other earthly delights.

Attendee backgrounds covered, as the governor aptly described, sundry “disciplines” ranging from state legislators, to lobbyists, to bureaucratic big shots, to Ohio Wildlife Council members and to media personages, a few of those mere scribblers.

Those who fished before being prematurely pushed off the lake by weather and those who opted to observe doings at the Lake Erie Research Unit seemed to have a good time.

How could one not? It beats working.

The Lake Erie Charter Boat Association, a primary host of the event and which exists pretty much because of a sporadic but presently booming walleye business, enlisted 19 seasoned and able skippers to volunteer time, money and expertise toward the satisfaction of all aboard.

DeWine, as part of this year’s theme, touted his administration’s vigorous efforts, overseen by Mertz and funded by the legislature, to mitigate some of the bad stuff that has otherwise flowed unabated into Lake Erie.

A significant part of the effort has been the re-establishment of wetlands as buffers along the lake’s drainage system to help contain nutrient runoff from agricultural fields and suburban developments.

Water as a necessity for life holds value beyond appraising, but the lake’s worth as a commodity can be priced into its attractiveness as a generator of economic activity. Allure diminishes whenever toxic algae blooms and bacteria-ridden beaches and dead zones reappear in headlines and resonate as TV sound bites.

Walleye are having their day, but today with its economic priorities isn’t the only day.

In the not-distant past, walleye, reigning superstar, were a commercial footnote on Lake Erie. Lake herring, known as cisco, were prized as the lake’s money fish. Whitefish for years comprised a big part of the bounty. A little later blue pike became commercially important.

After years of neglect, pollution and mismanagement, cisco vanished, blue pike vanished and whitefish numbers became negligible and never recovered. Lake sturgeon, once numerous, all but disappeared. Sauger were eliminated from Sandusky Bay.

“I sometimes wonder how this place looked a few hundred years ago,” said Eric Weimer, supervisor of the wildlife division’s research facility in Sandusky, while driving across the bay on the causeway that links Ottawa and Erie counties. “I’d like to see what the water looked like then, the vegetation, the animal life.”

That would require a time machine. Without another Great Black Swamp, long eradicated, the lake can’t be what it was. Efforts like DeWine’s, nonetheless, might make it better than it’s been.