Potential changes to 34 Alberta Lakes
 

Just finished a quick read on the my wild Alberta site that they are looking at potentially changing the limits on 34 lakes.
Looks Like they are looking at possibly making walleye and pike fishing to have a zero limit with catch and release only at Fawcett Lake and possibly other lakes as well.

https://talkaep.alberta.ca/northern-...ent-frameworks

Click on the Proposed Recreation Fisheries Management Objective on the right side under Document Library

I'll have to read it end to end in order to formulate a full opinion, but so far I think most of what I've seen makes sense.

They are opening some lakes to harvest in order to balance out the ones who will be closed. I think the alignment of the ones that are C&R and the "Catch and Keep" lakes makes a little more sense, at least from initial reading.

I'll comment here again once I've read the entire thing.

this forum has given me some great information to develop some opinions, and although I do not believe everything is being handled "perfectly", (good luck), this seems to make sense. Guess we'll see how it goes!

Except for some of the parts that Identify endangered/vulnerable lakes and yet you can go there to those lakes and catch 100 x 2#Walleye each person in 3 hours. I don’t think their science or surveys of some of those lakes are completely sound based on my catch rate at least, and once again decisions will likely be made half baked. Expect more closures and fewer harvest opportunities while we continue to put all resources in to stocking Trout. As for tags, great system this is, been able to keep 6 Walleye in the last 6 years, gee thanks! Have to buy Walleye filets from Manitoba at Costco to get a taste. Admittedly a lot cheaper than buying gear and paying for fuel to go fishing myself. Can’t run up to Slave every week for a fish. Don’t understand the thought process of allowing to keep fish over 50cm which are the large prime breeding stock producing millions of eggs while not allowing people to keep the small fish for the pan. This is completely backwards to the rest of the world. They say it is to allow those small fish a chance to grow up and spawn at least once. Seems backasswords to me. Hurry up and wait for those small ones to grow up in a lake where they eat each other out of house and home, the forage base gets thinned out greatly by overpopulation of small Walleye (ie: lack of baitfish) and allow people to keep the larger fish that will spawn millions of eggs this spring? Huh? Everywhere else that i have ever been allows some harvest of smaller fish whilst protecting the large breeder stocks. If it’s a bad recruitment year and there aren’t many small fish in a couple years then so be it, the big fish get to live on and keep spawning. I don’t think you need a tag system to manage that way, just a max length and modest bag limit. I think our Gov probably knows as much about managing fisheries as they do about controlling deficits. I’m no expert, but I’ve seen enough to make me question the validity of their decision making.
:snapoutofit:

Oh great here we go again... messing up more lakes.

what I'd really love to see is a change in the dozen or so put and take trout lakes around Calgary, maybe make 2 or 3 C&R and stock in lesser density. I like stillwater fishing but catching 10 inch trout gets old after about.... 1 of them

Winterkill / Summerkill Lakes
 

I took a quick read, and at least this time around they acknowledge that some populations are continually set up for failure as the lakes are shallow and prone to die offs.

Best examples are Isle Lake and Utikima Lakes. We continually see a build up of populations only to get a bad winter kill which means that the lake never gets opened because the population has to "rebuild".

For Utikima, it is long overdue, and when it does winter kill as it has so many times before, we start from the beginning. Utikima is a lake where there is very little summer pressure as you cannot easily get a boat in. So why not let the walleye be utilized?

Why not recognize that the resource is much better being used, as any low population numbers that result from sport fishing means nothing when the next winter kill happens. The fish die.

As such, these are the types of lakes that should have liberal walleye and pike limits. For Isle, it has not been open in over a decade. But it winterkilled a couple of times in the period it was closed. Lots of dead fish to feed the sea gulls.

In other words, sportfishing is not the enemy, so let us take some fish before the lake winterkills again.

Drewski

X2

We keep all the breeders. They always say fishing pressure, no the limit was way to high years ago at 10 for pike, and 10 whitefish in some lakes and they could have never supported limits like that. Just follow saskatchewan, in their regs they say to keep a fish if it's bleeding, but not in good old alberta, we put ours back just to die because of stupid regulations.
Alberta couldn't manage a gold fish properly if they had to.

Couldn't agree more with you on your assessment of Utikima, the lake bounces back quickly from die offs yet low catch limits even though it appears the anglers have little effect on the population. Might as well utilize the fish in the good years.

Another thing I picked up from reading the survey was that basically none of the bait fish have been assessed in the lakes. How can you properly assess the predator fish if you don't know the food availability?

If you read through, they are opening quite a few lakes to harvest to balance out the ones that may be closed. Its not all just closures and C&R rules.

These are also proposed changes, I'm sure there will be edits to this before it is implemented.

Easy solutions. Switch lakes to 1 keeper walleye and c/r on jacks.

I don't get why they think that they need to wait until 2020 to open up walleye in Wabamun, by then they will have evolved into perch haha! So many walleye in that lake.

One pike no size limit I think would help some lakes I see on that list. A couple of those are over ran with 1.5 to 2.5lb pike perch hook couldn’t hit the bottom of the lake in the summer. When the pike limit was 10 and people had 5 tip ups per person the pike never went extinct. Put a size limit Like they have on pike ruin the pike fishing and wrecked the other species in the lake to

I believe it is the stocked fry's spawn has to spawn plus 1 or 2 year classes. So 10 or more years from stocking. I believe thats what they used to go by and probably still do.