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After a strong spring spawning and years of improving water quality, fishing on Grand Lake is as good as ever in 2023.
Black crappie remain the best in terms of abundance and size, growing 2 to 3 inches above the state average of 10.6 inches, according to Ohio Department of Natural Resources data released last month. But largemouth bass and catfish are also doing well.
"Our lake is definitely producing some better quality fish," said Matt Patton, owner of East Side Bait and Tackle in St. Marys. "Because last year, guys fishing crappie tournaments, they were catching 81/2 or barely 9-inch crappie, and struggling. This year, it's like the total opposite. We've had close to 3-pound crappie come out of the lake this year."
Grand Lake St. Marys State Park Manager Dave Faler confirmed that he's seen bigger fish across all species this year.
"I think the biggest thing is the fish are just catching up from previous years," he said.
Matt Tuttle, who runs a guide service for crappie fishing on the lake, said consistent spring temperatures and better water quality have led to two or three good spawning years.
"This year, it just seemed like it was even later into May before we actually got warm, so all the spawn has been pushed out," he said.
Tuttle was still catching crappie with spawning colors in late June, and Faler said he'd seen pictures of bass with bloody tails that were still spawning into mid-July.
Tuttle said measures to control the blue-green algae help ensure there's enough oxygen in the water for fish.
Moreover, Faler said treatment trains have been found to be "highly effective" in filtering out nutrient pollutants, the dredge program is more aggressive and water quality has been getting better every year.
"It being a shallow lake, (the algae) really starves our lake of oxygen," Tuttle said. "When it starves the water of oxygen, it affects all the fish. We have that food chain in the lake that you've got to have good oxygenated water for bait. If they don't have good quality, then that just goes right down the line to the (game) fish."
Tuttle said the No. 1 baitfish in Grand Lake is shad, then crawdads, with bass also preying on bluegills. The shad feed off the moss on docks, logs and the bottom of boats, making dock areas and fallen trees excellent places to angle for game fish.
Patton said he sells "a truckload" of shad every year. Tuttle often switches to live bait in the summer.
"In these real hot temperatures, I'll make sure I have live bait, like minnows or wax worms," Tuttle said. "We'll start to see a shad spawn hatch, and we'll start to see a lot of little small bait. The crappies, actually, they feed more in the summer than they do in the spring and fall. So the live bait angle is something I do right away."
Jigs are the most popular choice for crappie, and Russ Bailey, host of the fishing show BrushPile Fishing, said he uses jigs 95% of the time. He said his go-to colors are purple and pink, which Tuttle and Patton seconded. He uses chartreuse or yellow for muddier water.
Several local fishermen sell handmade jigs, and Patton mentioned one in St. Marys who tests his offerings in Grand Lake and tailors them to its crappie.
"When a new color or a new body style comes out, he's got a crew of tournament fishermen, guys that I deal with and he deals with, and they go out and test them and they get the right color," Patton said. "We have a red and chartreuse and it's been fine-tuned to where we got it now, and it's been a heck of a jig. The same with the purple and chartreuse. They just fine-tune them until it's right."
Bailey tests jigs for Crappie Magnet in Grand Lake and around Ohio. He said many of them are shaped like shad to mimic the baitfish.
Black Crappie
Crappie prefer clear waters with little current. They tend to circulate around natural or man-made submerged structures. They like to feed in the morning. Many Grand Lake black crappie are reported to be 12 inches or longer.
Tuttle said crappie tend to circulate in shallower water in spring and fall. In summer, he looks to the middle of the boat channels. Bailey added that channels on the less-popular north shoreline can be just as productive.
"I'll look for anywhere from 1-to-about-5-feet of water, and if you get into the coves, there's a lot of manmade structure that you can fish," Bailey said. "Riprap (chunks of rock or gravel by the shore) is always good to fish, and then aluminum lifts are probably my favorite thing to fish. Going colder days, you've got the sun beating down on the aluminum, you've got the moss under there bringing in the baitfish and those crappie come right in."
On warmer days, Bailey said he likes "shooting" under pontoons.
"You take that jig and you pull it back, and your rod is like a bow and arrow," he explained. "You shoot that jig underneath pontoons, those fish are just looking for shade, and you can get all the way back underneath them. Pontoons, (on) warm days, sunny days, are kind of hard to beat here."
Black crappie numbers were on the rise in 2021, the last year ODNR data was available. Grand Lake's black crappie average 12 or 13 inches full-grown. White crappie populations in 2021 were low but increased slightly.
Faler said crappie colors can vary based on water clarity and environment. The only sure-fire way to tell the difference is to count the rays or spines on the dorsal fin. He said electrofishing - surveys using an underwater current to lure fish to one spot - has attracted both species in the lake.
Bailey said Grand Lake's underwater rocks and stumps suit black crappie better, but pointed out white crappie seem to be on the rise.
"They're still not prominent here, the black crappie are, but it's good seeing some of the white crappie coming in," he said. "I think if we could get some more vegetation, we would see a lot more."
Largemouth Bass
This popular sport fish is carnivorous and will go for anything from live bait to plastic worms, spinnerbait, crankbait or jigs. They love lakes with lots of vegetation and structures.
Largemouth bass numbers in Grand Lake decreased in 2019, the last year ODNR data was available for them. Bass tended not to grow as large as the statewide average.
But Faler, who fishes for bass and directs bass tournaments on the lake, confirmed that the quality and numbers of bass are up this year.
Tuttle estimates that the bass population has at least doubled in the last five years.
"I was out practicing for a bass tournament, and - this is unheard of - I had over 30 keepers on a day of fishing, for bass fishing," Tuttle said. "Typically a great day of bass fishing on Grand Lake would be, 'Hey, I had 10 keepers, eight or 10 keepers.' And I had over 30. Ten years ago, you could go a day and not even get bit."
Brandon Gibson, who will be a senior at St. Marys Memorial High School, has won five bass tournaments on the lake this year. He agreed bass fishing has been strong in 2023, noting three or four 6-pound bass have come out of the lake in tournaments, including one caught by his fishing partner, Brayden Hoehn, that weighed in at 6.32 pounds.
After spawning ends, bass fishing also gets concentrated in the channels. Gibson estimated that 95% of the bass caught are in the channels, because they are often deeper than most of Grand Lake and have a harder bottom to go with more rocks and brush piles. Even fishermen who don't target the channels, he said, will often set up right outside them in the main lake.
Elsewhere on the lake, it can be much harder to find fish.
"After the bass are done spawning in the springtime, the bigger fish are really, really hard to locate, for whatever reason," he said. "Most lakes, you can find them out deep. But with it being such a shallow lake and kind of featureless on the main lake - there's not a whole lot of contours or anything - it's just really hard to locate."
Spinnerbait
Despite the size of Grand Lake, Bailey and Gibson both said it "fishes small," meaning fishermen tend to clump together in the best spots, particularly channels on the south shore.
Gibson said those spots are referred to as "community holes" because while they typically hold fish, they also draw in a lot of fishermen.
"Even though there's fish there, they kind of get smart," he said. "So you always want to try to find fish outside of the really pressured channels. But also, part of that is just picking apart those pressured channels and being able to catch fish that other people can't.
"I think it's just really important to do what other people aren't doing," he continued. "You see a lot, a lot of guys throwing spinnerbaits on this lake, and they do work, they work really well, but I personally just don't like doing it because so many people throw them, and I don't think they look really natural."
Bailey also said that electronic fish-finders have made it easier to catch fish through the summer.
"I've been in the fishing industry a lot of years, and I have never seen a bigger game changer than Livescope," he said.
However, Gibson said that the fish-finders help less on Grand Lake since it's so shallow, and the stained water and abundance of baitfish can make them harder to read, he said.
Catfish
Frequent bottom feeders, they will go for any nightcrawler or other natural bait. They can be found in a wide variety of environments - and they positively thrive in muddy, low-oxygen lakes or ponds. Channel catfish prefer the moving water of streams emptying into lakes.
ODNR released no data on catfish in the lake, but its angler survey of Grand Lake from 2019 showed that 15.6% of fishermen targeted catfish, while 26.1% sought crappie, 36.2% bass and 19.4% no particular species.
Patton said he doesn't go out fishing much, but when he does he tends to go after flathead catfish, usually using live bluegill or goldfish. While Grand Lake is more known for channel catfish, he said he's heard that several big flatheads have been caught on the north side of the lake this year.
"The flatheads are coming back, it's just been a slow process," he said. "When we got the algae bloom years ago, it killed off all them big fish, and a lot of them were blue cats (channel catfish) and flatheads. But it sounds like they're making a comeback. One of the pictures I've seen was on a scale, and it was a 14-pound flathead."
No ODNR data was available for yellow perch or walleye, although Faler said walleye were present in a big fish kill a couple years ago. Bailey said that he'd heard perch also were making a comeback in recent years after peaking in the early 90s.
Patton said he's heard of "phenomenal" bluegills coming out of the lake, too. For those targeting bluegills, Tuttle recommended crickets, which are one of their major food sources.
Freshwater drum (sheepshead) and grass carp, both of which are less popular with fishermen, have no publicly available data from ODNR, and Faler said surveys aren't taken for the drum. Anecdotal evidence suggests both populations are strong, and Tuttle estimated that Grand Lake's carp could get up to 10 to 15 pounds.
But crappie, catfish and largemouth bass are the major draws, and between the three, Faler said that Grand Lake sees about 75 tournaments a year.
Faler said Grand Lake has been seeing more visitors. For fishermen, Faler said that issues with underwater weeds at Indian Lake helped drive a return to Grand Lake as its water improved, and Patton noted a "significant" number of out-of-town and out-of-state fishermen coming into his shop, including from as far away as Georgia.
"There's definitely been an influx and that's attributable to the good fishing that's happening on Grand Lake," Tuttle agreed. "Other lakes, maybe they'll hit a lull in their bites, and they come to Grand Lake and they'll have success, because our fishing has been really, really good the last couple years."
Good fishing can be found all around Grand Lake.
