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Old 09-27-2017, 03:28 PM
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RavYak RavYak is offline
 
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: West Edmonton
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Originally Posted by ecsuplander View Post
Not sure about that. From personal experience I have been fishing Lac St. Anne for 15 years. Historically a great walleye lake. Then overfished, walleye were hard to come by. Zero harvest- walleye came back. Now we have limited harvest of walleye on the lake. Seems that in this instance it worked. Not sure if this is applicable to these waterways or not.
Ste. Anne was never closed like what they want to do with these rivers.

These rivers are for the most part catch and release already.

I also bet you when they shut Ste. Anne, Pigeon and lots of these other lakes to retention they ended up wrecking a bunch more lakes by overloading them with pressure...

Gotta think of all the consequences of these actions. It started with the Pembina, now they want to do Kakwa, Berland, Clearwater and Ram. Next year they will add more... And soon they will all be closed... Meanwhile habitat destruction due to commercial practices will continue as well as other situations that affect these rivers much more then the C&R sports fishermen...

I am only ok with fisheries closing waterbodies if it is to protect a population of a species. Like what they do at Primrose for walleye, Job for cutthroat and Pinto for bulls. The rest of the waterbodies they can manage using either varied retention or C&R, if a river can't handle the C&R pressure then the fishing success will drop and people will go elsewhere giving the river time to recover. I have seen this on the walleye stocked lakes in SK where locals jump from lake to lake as they recover and crash due to over harvesting.

Anglers need to remember that fishing quality is not the biologists or AEP's primary concern. They having been pushing their limits these last few years and we need to keep them in check in situations like this.

What AEP should do is start fixing up some of these rivers. Start rebuilding or adding spawning and overwintering locations. Fix areas damaged by floods and commercial activities etc. Back in the day fisheries used to do a lot of that kind of stuff but not anymore.
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