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Old 08-22-2017, 04:32 PM
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RavYak RavYak is offline
 
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: West Edmonton
Posts: 5,174
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Good basis for a questionnaire but they should have had comment sections on the later questions.

Reduced open seasons of 1-3 weeks would be an absolute gong show, I wouldn't even want to imagine what this would look like.

I don't get fisheries love for these tags. It is a ridiculously labour intensive process that creates a ton of work and requires close monitoring(that doesn't always happen). It is far from a perfect system as we saw with Battle Lake.

Minimum sizes works, fisheries was nice enough to tell us that previously but it is also obvious if you go fish a lake with minimum size limits. The only time it fails is if the minimum size wasn't set high enough to allow the fish to breed a few years or if there is excessive poaching or netting. Yes it is hard to catch a fish big enough in lots of these lakes but there are still lots of fish in them and they do constantly grow big enough to allow anglers to take home a meal now and then.

Slot sizes still make the most sense to me on the majority of our lakes. What I think should be done and is the simplest is the following.

On lakes that are in bad shape stock the lake to help speed up recovery and have them C&R until the population gets a foothold.

On the remainder of lakes there should be a province wide slot limit of say 50-55 or 50-60 cm and then vary the limit quantity based on lake location(lakes like Slave might be able to sustain 2 fish and remote lakes maybe 2 whereas anything close to a city leave to 1). This makes enforcement super easy and ensures sustainability across the province and would also lead to a number of more lakes with trophy fish.

Then in a small select group of lakes small numbers of tags or permanent C&R could be used to create trophy fisheries.
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