Ahh, young love.
This is where Grand River flows into Lake Erie, and I’m here on an after-work Friday when the skies are clear and the winds are calm. You’d think the massive parking areas would be full, but they’re empty. I’m the only angler on this granite-slab breakwall that leads out into Lake Erie.
Until the arrival of 21-year-old Mike Kozar and Maggie Kleinman – both with fishing rods. They settle on a perch near mine and Mike casts while Maggie watches. He’s throwing a Mepps Minnow.
My previous hour alone here has been fishless and biteless. A two-pound smallmouth followed my Lucky Craft Pointer all the way in but didn’t bite. Other than a freshwater drum and three tiny bluegill, the smallmouth is the only fish I’ve seen in this clear water. On his first cast I hear Mike exclaim, and then learn that a smallmouth has followed his Mepps.
He lives in Cleveland and fishing is his favorite pastime, but this is his first time here. His father gave him a book of 55 places to fish within an hour’s drive of downtown Cleveland, and that’s how he found Headlands Beach State Park. The book didn’t tell about the 600-yard walk from the parking lot to the breakwall.
The walk is along a trail bordered by Queen Anne’s Lace and chirping crickets, carpeted with thick sand and overhung by Sweet Gum and Oak. I even spotted a vine of wild grapes – half the size of grocery grapes, but ripe and sweet. Rich blue skin and deep red-purple meat. There are also yellow cornflowers and little daisy-like flowers hued with the palest of lavender.
Mike learned to fish from his father. “I remember being out on a Lake Erie pier with my father – I was around 10 – and we were using live bait and I didn’t really know what I was doing.” Mike continues to cast the Mepps Minnow as he talks. “He had rigged up a line with live bait and weights on the bottom, and I was getting ready to wind it in to put on a lure, and a big fish was on. I was fighting this thing, and Dad was behind me helping. And it turned out to be a huge catfish – 28 inches. Dad was ecstatic.”
Lake Erie is flat today – much different from my first time at Erie last October when the wind blew horizontal thundersnow and the lake was closed to all boat traffic. On today’s Erie I see pleasure boaters, jet skis, swimmers, and even a kayaker. The lake is flat all the way to the horizon – flat enough to see a fish dimple the surface. But I see none.
Maggie grew up around fishing, but “Mike got me into it a lot more. I was kind of grossed out when I was younger – the live bait and all – but Mike got me into using lures.” Maggie smiles as she talks. “Most recent was in the Adirondaks. Mike took me and my two sisters out in this little fishing boat in an inlet and we caught bass and perch and bluegill.”
These granite slabs that make this breakwall are huge and old. They bear old drill marks and an occasional new engraving. One says “I [heart] DB 2005” – chiseled deep into the granite, the product of special tools and quality time. Before Mike and Maggie arrived I spied a brown bushy tail disappear between granite slabs. I waited and watched and eventually a brown head, smaller than my fist, poked out. Then the whole body – a mink I suppose. Hershey brown head and eyes, a 14-inch body, and a tail equally long. He scampered away from me and disappeared into other slabs of granite.
Mike works at Notre Dame College – groundskeeper and maintenance. “The best thing is the people – all really nice. What I like least would of
course have to be the pay - always looking for more money.”Mike continues to work the Mepps Minnow. A lot of past success with it has given him great confidence. I’ve had no success with the lures I’ve thrown thus far: the Pointer, a couple of Rat-L-Traps, a yellow crankbait, several offerings on a dropshot rig, and at one point I decided to throw the goby.
“Throw the Goby.” Sounds like a euphemism for some unknown act. We don’t have gobies in Virginia, so I’m not experienced with them. But here on Erie, gobies – little brown bottom-dwelling fish - compose the entire diet of the smallmouths. At a tackle store I bought some plastic gobies – lures that I thought looked ridiculous, but that the salesman (also definitely a good angler) assured me could catch fish. But with no confidence at all, I was at a disadvantage. Nevertheless I did throw the goby. No bites at all. That’s it. From now on I’ll use the phrase “Throw the Goby” to indicate that I’m using a lure with which I have no confidence.
Mike’s rod bends and water splashes and a fish comes off right there at his feet. He didn’t see it well enough to identify it. Could have been a smallmouth. Maybe a drum. On the Mepps Minnow. He keeps casting it.
“It gets crazy around graduation time,” he continues about his work. “Last spring we built a huge patio with a two-foot stone wall and with pavers. We had to level everything, cut the stone, and make it look nice. We did it in only two days. Pretty crazy.”
Maggie – still merely watching from her perch on a higher slab of granite – works as a server at California Pizza Kitchen. I ask her if she can tell if a customer will be a big tipper or small tipper. “75% of the time.” She’s been there three years and has steady customers who ask for her. “It’s pretty much guaranteed that there will be a good tip if they’re regulars.” I ask her if age makes a difference. “Late twenties to forties is best. Old people don’t tip so well. And younger kids don’t really understand. They’ll all order waters and split a pizza. They just don’t understand.”
Why does she like to fish? “I get to spend time with him,” she says with a nod towards Mike. “It’s always interesting to learn new things and try new spots.” Her eyes search as she contemplates. “It’s sometimes frustrating for a new fisher like me. I get my line caught [Mike chuckles] but he helps me out a lot.”
Mike: “It’s not always about catching fish; it’s having a good time with Maggie or my dad or whoever I’m with.”
Mike’s rod bends again and again the fish shakes off at his feet. “It was smaller than the first fish, but it looked like a striper,” he says as he turns towards me. “Do they have stripers in here?” I tell him I don’t think so, but later I remember that there are white bass in here – a slivery striped fish that does look like a striper.
I watch a 30-foot sailboat come in under power, its sails gone from the masts. A distant windsurfer that I’ve been watching has made enough progress – finally – to get to the main lane headed into the marina area. Also the lane used by the powerboats which now have to dodge this slow-moving clutter.
A big orange and black butterfly – the size of a Monarch – flutters and glides out over the lake a hundred yards and then comes back. Later I will see three more just like him venture for outings on the lake.
As Linda Greenlaw says in her book All Fisherman are Liars which I just read, “If you’re not catching anything, change something.” Which I do now. Over and over. Now I go to a rig I’ve just invented: a goby dropshot. It’s the weighted goby with another hook with a small worm on it a foot up the line. Nothing.
Mike’s favorite type of fishing? “Definitely Steelhead!” he says without pause. “On the Chagrin with a flyrod. I’ve been flyfishing for six years now.”
“He’s really good,” adds Maggie. “He’s caught some really big ones. How big . . .”
“Oh, they’re all big,” Mike interrupts. “Twenty inches or more.”
I switch to a Carolina rig and pull a mini-Senko behind it. Then various worms. Nothing. And I move to other locations. Occasionally Maggie looks over and asks – I shake my head – and she reports the same with Mike.
These are two happy young folks with bright smiles and hopeful eyes who are in love with fishing. “It’s so relaxing,” says Mike in response to my question why he likes it. “And I really like the outdoors.”
“And it takes your mind off things,” Maggie says. “He’s already relaxed. He had a hard day.”
Last October Erie was a cold, wet blur. Some of the tournament anglers even quit and went home. At one point I lashed my boat to a piling in the harbor for three hours while we were pelted with sleet and rain and horizontal thundersnow and 30-mile winds. I did catch one keeper during those hours. Hope does spring eternal.
Photo: Maggie Kleinman and Matt Kozar at Headlands Beach State Park
