Lake Erie Ice Fishing Bolstered by 100,000+ Minnows

East Point Ice Charters owner Aaron Schroeder hasn’t had to buy minnows in 10 years but he’s not complaining, even though it set him back $5,600.

“No minnows means a good year of ice,” Schroeder says. “And that’s all we’re praying for right now."

While you can use other bait when ice fishing for walleye, Schroeder, who operates his business off the island of Put-in-Bay, says minnows are by far the best bait. 

“The minnows left the island in mid-October,” he says. “Nobody has any idea where they went. I looked in every creek, every tributary, anything that had water, all the way a mile inland and could not find minnows anywhere.”

That’s why Schroeder bought 80 gallons of minnows — at $70 a gallon — from a source on the mainland and got them over to the island today, which is the last day Miller Boat Line will operate until spring. That amounts to about 112,000 minnows.

While the link between an absence of minnows and good ice fishing is somewhat anecdotal, Schroeder has other evidence to support his hunch. Already, he says, there’s at least five or six inches of ice off the island — and the forecast calls for below-freezing temperatures for the next nine days. He is hopeful that he can begin running his ice fishing charters as soon as Jan. 9.

The total ice cover for Lake Erie is still close to 0% right now, but a slow start doesn’t mean a bad season, according to Schroeder. He reports that 2021 was the last decent year of ice fishing and, in early January of that year, Lake Erie ice coverage was close to 0%. Ice formation began to take off in mid-January, however, and by mid-February ice had exceeded the historical average, as tracked by the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.

Julene Market, the marketing director and part-owner of Miller Boat Line, also thinks the outlook is good. “The deep freeze January forecast has islanders eagerly looking forward to a good stretch of ice fishing and winter parties,” she says.

So where did the minnows go?

“We’ve had a lot of ideas we’ve been bouncing off each other,” Schroeder says. “We believe it’s just that we had so many storms that turned the lake over.”

The turbulent weather has included a series of seiches, which slosh water from one side of the lake to the other like a seesaw, during which the western basin of Lake Erie temporarily lost up to three feet of water. “There’s been a lot of them,” Schroeder says. “Four in the last two weeks.”

Whatever the reason the minnows are gone, Schroeder says it’s a good sign when paired with late ice formation.

“Every season we’ve had where there were no minnows available and ice came in after January we’ve had phenomenal fishing,” he says.

To contact East Point Ice Charters, call 419-870-8200.

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