Erie's best days???

[cycleguy]

jonk:

Your post that states it was rare to get one under 20 inches should have been a red flag for future population numbers. With no small fish being caught it should have told you they were absent or non existent and had most likely been consumed by the larger walleyes. All fish in lake Erie start out as a microscopic organism much smaller than 20 inches long and those hogs you related to. Like I said the smelt population had been reduced to a level below what would be needed to sustain such large numbers of large predator fish. Just where would the little ones be that should be in line to replace all of the 20 plus inch fish? You should have been catching some shorts.

Spending large sums of money on raising a few hundred thousand fry to feed the larger walleyes that were present in the lake was a waste of resources. The lake has to balance itself with out artificial help. The lake is to large for a put and take type of management system that works rather well on small by comparison inland lakes. The only help the lake can use efficiently is to stop the pollution and the setting of harvest limits. It has been proven time and time again that if the conditions for the survival of naturally occurring spawned and hatched walleyes is not favorable then those same conditions would be just as devastating to hatchery raised walleyes.

Very well put.

On Lake Michigan (SE WI) we have the same complaints… stock more salmon, stock more salmon so I can get back to catching more. Problem is there is so much less food for them, the can't survive. When you dig into the very deep studies and research that goes into a balanced system, your outlook on will change drastically. I spent a half day reading reports and viewing videos on it all… and have far more respect for the efforts that go into it all now.

[jonk]

jonk:

I feel what you are saying and you are correct as far as what it was like in the late 70s early 80s. I posted that there was an over abundance of smelt in the lake at that time, they were only there because there was a lack of predator fish(walleyes) when the walleyes came back they came back in large numbers, numbers that were to large for the lake to support. Actually there was an over abundance of other food source fish also. Once the smelt population was put in check the walleyes started to decline again simply because there was not enough food to support such large numbers on a continuing basis. The lake has started to balance out better now and hopefully it remain balanced. Some of the best biologist Ohio has to offer seems to think the maximum number of Walleyes that the lake can sustain on a continuing basis would be fluctuations somewhere between 28 million and 38 million, some of the experts think that even those numbers may be a little high.

Your post that states it was rare to get one under 20 inches should have been a red flag for future population numbers. With no small fish being caught it should have told you they were absent or non existent and had most likely been consumed by the larger walleyes. All fish in lake Erie start out as a microscopic organism much smaller than 20 inches long and those hogs you related to. Like I said the smelt population had been reduced to a level below what would be needed to sustain such large numbers of large predator fish. Just where would the little ones be that should be in line to replace all of the 20 plus inch fish? You should have been catching some shorts.

Spending large sums of money on raising a few hundred thousand fry to feed the larger walleyes that were present in the lake was a waste of resources. The lake has to balance itself with out artificial help. The lake is to large for a put and take type of management system that works rather well on small by comparison inland lakes. The only help the lake can use efficiently is to stop the pollution and the setting of harvest limits. It has been proven time and time again that if the conditions for the survival of naturally occurring spawned and hatched walleyes is not favorable then those same conditions would be just as devastating to hatchery raised walleyes.

it's certainly food for thought and I see the logic in a lot of what you say; that said, answer me this: if the fact that in the 80s and 90s most fish were big was an indicator that they were being artificially supported by a freak run of shad and other baitfish abounding, to the point that they were eating their own young.... well when was the last time you caught a small sheephead? I'd easily say that a quarter of the sheephead I get are fish ohio size, and I probably got 1-2 last year that were under 15". So what's "artificially" keeping them large?

Point being, we overfished the walleye back in the day when I was a kid and a teenager, just as my parents and granparents did with perch and the blue pike (to extinction). Day was you could go out and get a stringer of perch, 50, 60 of 'em per person, and they were all good size, 10 inches or so with the odd bigger one. Getting the little 4" babies was unheard of.

Based on the stories (and pictures) I have seen from perch fishing in the 50s and 60s, my own experience walleye fishing when young, and my current experience with sheephead, I'd postulate that big fish means a healthy fishery. Catching fish too small to keep (or be worth keeping) is an indication of an unhealthy fishery. Either it's overfished, or underfed, or something.

Now I do note that the average size of the walleye I get is on the upswing. I think things are slowly improving. But it really did crash and burn there for a few years.