Quote Originally Posted by wakina View Post
LEfriend:
You are exactly right they did change their assessment in late 2010 based on further trawls and information provided by some of the other jurisdictions! I did not mean to make it sound like I do not put my faith in the ODNR, I feel they have a thankless job that is hard enough to get done properly without me or anyone else bashing them. In order to have something to compare the new YOY class to~~ they have to do the trawls in the same geographic locations and water depth's every year or the comparison would be like apples to oranges so to me if there is a flaw in their assessments it would be Mother Nature's fault through her changing conditions and not the ODNR's.

Unlike 2010 there was no official follow up in 2011 to the August Trawls by the ODNR, there were no ODNR news release's confirming their findings once all of the data was in from the other jurisdictions and processed. The only news that I have found beyond the release in early Sept came from Ohio Sea Grant. Link provided.
http://ohioseagrant.osu.edu/discuss/...5f471393148016.
Even the ODNR's website leads one to believe that the August trawls are only a portion of the information the ODNR uses to assess the quality of the current years hatch I believe they even stated that they were also using a 2nd series of trawls in October(later in the fall) to better assess the current hatch, I cannot find the webpage for that info at this time but I am still looking. At this time their assessment of the 2011 and 2012 hatches are not supported by the number of short walleyes in the 7 to 10 inch size(2012 hatch) or the number 13 to 15 inch shorts(2011 hatch). One only needs to ask this question! Where did these shorts come from if not from the 2011 and 2012 spawns?

As to cooking the books that would not serve anyone's purpose especially their(ODNR's)own. The vast majority of the fisheries division relies heavily on the Lake Erie Walleye and Yellow Perch fisheries so to cook the books would only produce a very short life expectancy for those officials and their lucrative budgets.
Wakina - Thanks, no problem, we're on the same page. If you go to the home page of Lake Erie Fisheries Unit and click on the latest "Lake Erie Status Link" you can get the 2012 report that was prepared Mar 2013. The 2011 might be archived at the bottom. Here is link to their page:

http://www.dnr.state.oh.us/Home/Fish...3/Default.aspx

The number of shorts is an interesting question. I am acquainted with a couple of those guys and may email them that one. Course catching shorts in one area and translating that to an accurate population estimate for whole lake are two different things. Nevertheless, it is a good sign and one certainly would rather see them than not, and hope they are a sign things are better than was thought. Good luck!