[bobalong]

Although I am not a big fan of the management of the walleye in this province, I think your comments should be directed more at the "boss" of our Fish and Wildlife biologists, than at the biologist them selves. It is not the fault of the biologist or F/G officers that there was no walleye stocking done in Alberta from 1999 until 2006, or that there were no officers hired to monitor our walleye lakes, or that in 2007 there was about 6.5 million dollars spent on trout stocking (I like trout fishing to but they are overstocking some of our lakes) and about 300,000 spent on walleye. The problem is walleye stocking is expensive and although the government knows that they are the most popular game fish in Alberta, and have been for years, they refuse to allocate sufficient funds to build and sustain the walleye fishery in this province. Other provinces and states spend millions every year, because the state of their walleye fisheries and the economy it generates is a priority, in Alberta it is not.
Anglers today are very efficient at finding and catching walleye, more than they have ever been. The equipment and the knowledge that is available now to anglers is probably 10 times (or more) than it was just 10 years ago. When was the last time you heard of someone fishing with a boat, gps, sonar, trolling motor, graphite rods, superline etc, actually getting skunked, it just doesn't happen very often. You can now hit half dozen websites on fishing and learn what depth the fish are at, what they are hitting on, what bait is working best, and what the best time of day is for catching them is, a lot of this information was not available before, at least not in the half hour or so it takes you now to find it.
I believe some of the strategy behind the protection of the small fish and the keep limit for big fish, is that our overall numbers of spawning fish on most lakes was far to low to sustain a healty population in a lot of our lakes. Most people can catch small walleye all day, but catching big fish consistantly does not happen near as often, although that is changing as well. Although stocking is used to compliment lake populations, I believe the goal is to have the lakes eventually support a natural population where no stocking is required.
Our lakes were depleted to such an extent before restrictions were implemented that it has taken 10 years or more just to get any kind of spawning population back in the lakes. These walleye have now spawned for a few years and I believe you will start to see healty populations with many different year classes appearing in our province, at least I am sure hoping they do.