Lake St. Clair rebounds to offer plush fishing for world championship

Andrea Cavallini is one of 52 competitors at the Hobie Fishing World Championships in the town of Tecumseh. He is here from Tuscany, Italy and caught a 21 inch bass this morning, one of the biggest catches of the day.

“I am happy to start today's competition like this,” Cavallini said. “No words to describe my feeling. For me it is an honor to stay here in the best competition in the world.”

At the Hobie Worlds in China nine years ago, a total of 30 fish were caught, according to Meet Director, Steve Field. Hundreds were hooked last year in Sweden, but in the first of three days in Tecumseh, the count is well over one thousand and growing.

“The waterway you have here in your backyard at Lake St Clair is so good at this time of year,” Fields pointed out. “If you can't catch a fish here, you should take up golf.”

Belle River's Tim Percy is at his fifth Hobie Worlds and caught a bass as our camera arrived at his location on the lake Friday morning.

“It's been a dream of mine, since the first one that I did, to bring the Hobie Fishing World to here to Canada and to Lake St Clair to get the participants to be able to experience what I experience every day.” Percy said.

It's a catch, photo, and release tournament that has very strict rules to follow after the catch.

“Each have to have an identifier,” Percy explained. “These are provided the morning of so that nobody can take an old photo of a fish and submit it as a new fish.”

Anglers had two days to pre-fish before competition started this morning.

“Your electronics plays a massive role in locating the fish during those two days,” Fields explained. “They'll put markers or what we call waypoints, and they'll probably have 100 waypoints.”

Trevor Pitcher, director of the Freshwater Restoration Ecology Centre in LaSalle, said Lake St. Clair is plush with fish after rebounding from water quality issues in the 1970s.

“Lake St Clair has really been bouncing back because of some of the rehabilitation work that's been going on over the years and so the habitat improved and it's come back in numbers.” Pitcher said.