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Originally Posted by Tcon
I got half way through that survey and declined to submit. It will provide little to no value and was a horrendous example of steering people into one bad option over another. Worse yet, they will use it as part of their decision making process, so scary.
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That is what annoyed me about them not including comment sections. Just a survey giving people bad options so that they will support the tagging option...
All the questions about walleye management why nothing about slot sizes? Minimum sizes but with increased minimums? So many options not address but hey at least they offered to open lakes for 1 week so we have 1000 anglers try to fish the same lake for their limit...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tcon
Are you sure that is the reason? I have a lake lot on Wabamun and have been fishing it almost exclusively this season. We have no issue catching healthy populations of both pike and walleye in a wide variety of size classes. The pike size of Wabamun was unnatural due to the higher than average water temperatures while the plants were open. Maybe the decline in pike size (if there is one) is a normalization based on a more natural environment.
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I am without doubt that it is a huge part of the reason. The lake literally collapsed within 2 years and the used to be massive population of 20-32 inch fish was decimated. I bet it is only 1/4 of what it was 3-4 years ago if that, I used to go out and catch 50 pike in a few hours after work and it was literally hard to not catch a pike. Now you have to work a lot harder to even find the pike and if you can get 50 pike in a full day of fishing you have had a pretty good day.
The big pike are all still healthy but lots of them die off just due to poor handling and natural causes. The locals see them wash up regularly and the biologist for the lake pretty much blamed us fishermen when I was messaging him about the pike dying off due to the walleye overrunning the lake...
This is far from the first time AB fisheries has done this to a lake though. They did the same thing to Ste. Anne, Pigeon and probably a number of other lakes as well. They are infatuated with walleye and destroy the pike population by overstocking the lake till it is overrun and full of stunted walleye... At least with wabamun if they leave it alone there is a chance of a quality walleye fishery in 5-10 years, that is if they ever start to grow...