Bob Frye

There’s fishing, there’s catching and then there’s keeping. The best waters have enough fish of reasonable size to allow anglers the chance to do all three.
Chapman Lake in Chapman State Park is once again such a water.

Talk about fishing in Erie County and lots of people probably imagine taking a charter on Lake Erie itself, or probing Presque Isle Bay, or targeting steelhead in the lake’s tributary streams.
Those are all highlights, for sure. But if you like smaller water, and perhaps a place that can offer dependable ice in most years, there’s also Lake LeBoeuf.

Pennsylvania may not be Florida or Texas or Georgia when it comes to producing monster-sized black bass, aka largemouths and smallmouths.
But you can usually expect to at least find them present in good numbers just about everywhere. Here’s the exception.