04-08-2018, 11:34 PM
fishday,
Good questions. We haven't done a population survey to quantify how many walleye are running up the inlet. That said, there are creel surveys from the days when the inlet was open back in the 60's and 70's estimating annual harvest of walleye from the inlet ranging on average from about 2,000-10,000 fish. There were even a few years back in the late 60's where it up to 26,000 fish harvested from the inlet. Those extraordinary years involved a stunted walleye population and aren't the norm. In addition, even back in the years when harvest was around 2-10K fish, those were the years when walleye were the top predator in Willard. Since the mid 90's the walleye have shared their top predator status with wiper, so its likely there overall numbers year to year are lower now than before the establishment of the wiper fishery. I'm hesitant to give a estimate of how many walleye are in the inlet these days, but it seems reasonable that it would be somewhere towards the low or middle end of that harvest estimate from the 60's and 70's and depends upon the year with influence from factors like population density, weather, inflow, etc.
We've been setting a total of eight hoop nets, and all together they catch a modest number of fish, which is about 20 females and around 40 males on a good night. This is a decent catch when you multiply that by the number of nights they are fished during the spawn, but there are surely many fish that are swimming over and around the nets. For comparison, a single gill net will catch anywhere from 20-50 walleye and we've been setting up to 6 of those gill nets per night. One thing to note with the gill nets is the type we use for the walleye spawn are made of nylon and not monofilament like the ones we typically use for our trend netting. The nylon nets don't have much give to them, so fish appear to get less tangled and there is considerably less mortality and stress with the nylon nets used for the spawning program. Perhaps one of the best things about the hoop nets for us has been that we can work them in any weather since the inlet doesn't get the whitecaps and waves the main lake does. When the lake gets stormy, we can't work gill nets, so the hoop nets give us fairly consistent source of fish when bad weather hits.
It seems the inlet discussion is winding down and I'm going to try to make this my last response for a while as I've got a pretty busy schedule this week and next both at work and home, but I wanted to bring up a few items I've also noted in the historical documents about the inlet that might of be of interest. First, there was indeed a lot of snagging or foul hooking that went on prior to the closure of the inlet back in the 70's. I'm sure everyone knows this, but an interesting point I haven't heard is that while outright snagging was illegal, it was legal to harvest fish that were foul hooked back then and the creel surveys indicated around 99% of the fish that were caught back then were foul hooked. Second, during the final years before the closure of the inlet, there was actually a nightly closure. The official hours the inlet was open were from 4:00 AM to 9:00 PM. There was also a single prong hook rule as well.
Finally, while it hasn't necessarily been stated - I've gotten the feeling that there are many that feel that DWR is opposed to closing the inlet. We are quite neutral on this issue. As I stated before, we manage for the public and in the case of the inlet in 2013, there was an opportunity to provide more shore anglers an opportunity to catch walleye and more people wanting it open than closed. I've been asked my opinion on the inlet several times and my response is that my opinion does not matter. I am an angler myself and not without an opinion, it just wouldn't be fair to let that opinion dictate how fisheries are managed. Our role is to deal with the biology and use it to make the things anglers want happen. The biology of fish harvest at the inlet is sound, so the social details of the inlet are up to you, the anglers. So again, I would encourage those truly interested in seeing changes at the inlet to get involved and make your opinion heard. There are RAC this year for new regulations and sooner than that, we will be doing our annual fishing regulation survey, which has a write in and open comment area.
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Good questions. We haven't done a population survey to quantify how many walleye are running up the inlet. That said, there are creel surveys from the days when the inlet was open back in the 60's and 70's estimating annual harvest of walleye from the inlet ranging on average from about 2,000-10,000 fish. There were even a few years back in the late 60's where it up to 26,000 fish harvested from the inlet. Those extraordinary years involved a stunted walleye population and aren't the norm. In addition, even back in the years when harvest was around 2-10K fish, those were the years when walleye were the top predator in Willard. Since the mid 90's the walleye have shared their top predator status with wiper, so its likely there overall numbers year to year are lower now than before the establishment of the wiper fishery. I'm hesitant to give a estimate of how many walleye are in the inlet these days, but it seems reasonable that it would be somewhere towards the low or middle end of that harvest estimate from the 60's and 70's and depends upon the year with influence from factors like population density, weather, inflow, etc.
We've been setting a total of eight hoop nets, and all together they catch a modest number of fish, which is about 20 females and around 40 males on a good night. This is a decent catch when you multiply that by the number of nights they are fished during the spawn, but there are surely many fish that are swimming over and around the nets. For comparison, a single gill net will catch anywhere from 20-50 walleye and we've been setting up to 6 of those gill nets per night. One thing to note with the gill nets is the type we use for the walleye spawn are made of nylon and not monofilament like the ones we typically use for our trend netting. The nylon nets don't have much give to them, so fish appear to get less tangled and there is considerably less mortality and stress with the nylon nets used for the spawning program. Perhaps one of the best things about the hoop nets for us has been that we can work them in any weather since the inlet doesn't get the whitecaps and waves the main lake does. When the lake gets stormy, we can't work gill nets, so the hoop nets give us fairly consistent source of fish when bad weather hits.
It seems the inlet discussion is winding down and I'm going to try to make this my last response for a while as I've got a pretty busy schedule this week and next both at work and home, but I wanted to bring up a few items I've also noted in the historical documents about the inlet that might of be of interest. First, there was indeed a lot of snagging or foul hooking that went on prior to the closure of the inlet back in the 70's. I'm sure everyone knows this, but an interesting point I haven't heard is that while outright snagging was illegal, it was legal to harvest fish that were foul hooked back then and the creel surveys indicated around 99% of the fish that were caught back then were foul hooked. Second, during the final years before the closure of the inlet, there was actually a nightly closure. The official hours the inlet was open were from 4:00 AM to 9:00 PM. There was also a single prong hook rule as well.
Finally, while it hasn't necessarily been stated - I've gotten the feeling that there are many that feel that DWR is opposed to closing the inlet. We are quite neutral on this issue. As I stated before, we manage for the public and in the case of the inlet in 2013, there was an opportunity to provide more shore anglers an opportunity to catch walleye and more people wanting it open than closed. I've been asked my opinion on the inlet several times and my response is that my opinion does not matter. I am an angler myself and not without an opinion, it just wouldn't be fair to let that opinion dictate how fisheries are managed. Our role is to deal with the biology and use it to make the things anglers want happen. The biology of fish harvest at the inlet is sound, so the social details of the inlet are up to you, the anglers. So again, I would encourage those truly interested in seeing changes at the inlet to get involved and make your opinion heard. There are RAC this year for new regulations and sooner than that, we will be doing our annual fishing regulation survey, which has a write in and open comment area.
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