Mille Lacs

[Fish Felon]

Going to be an unreal bite this year for early ice. Fall catch rates are 50% above average....so compared to this past summer's slow bite.....it's not up 50% from that, it's 50% above the long term average. I don't have the numbers but I'm going to guess catch rates are up 100% to 200% over this past summer, maybe even 300%, and why is that?

There's been too many walleyes left in the lake due to the mess that is co-management of the lake between the DNR and the tribes. The DNR wants to increase harvest, the tribes want to keep harvest extremely low believing that conservative harvest and stockpiling walleyes will lead to the lake eventually getting back to supporting the same levels of walleye biomass it did in the 80's & 90's. They are wrong in this concept and it frustrates the DNR to no end, but they can't really blame them for thinking that since it was former [worst] chief of fisheries [ever] Don Pereira that grilled this retardedly asinine concept into them for a dozen years that lead to the eventually buying in.

The only thing the low harvest creates is a lot of dead walleyes in the form of starvation. The notion that there needs to be a large amount of big walleyes to create significant year classes is false. It does the opposite. It produces to high of a density of fry and young walleyes that over compete for food, so they grow much slower, up until they are cannibalized by the very fish that were deliberately stockpiled to spawn and create them because there's no other forage in the lake.

The DNR still thinks everything in Mille Lacs is bottom up, when the reality is it's top down. YOY (young of year/age 0, the perch hatched this spring) and Y1 (year one/the perch that hatched spring of 2022) are gone. They have been decimated. They exist in extremely low numbers that are being depleted every moment under the surface of the lake's waters.

The good news is the massive 2013 year class has stunted out. They're in that 19" to 23" range and most likely will never grow to lengths in the upper twenties. The 2017 year class has basically caught them for size. Why is this good?

Because unlike a 26" plus fish....they can't eat a perch once it's grown to a jumbo. Once they're past 9" they're safe in the lake from anything besides a big pike, muskie, or angler which number drastically fewer than the walleyes, but more than big walleyes after every walleye over 23" died in 2020. This die off is what lead to the perch comeback, and the fairly abundant jumbo perch in Mille Lacs right now. The highest number of big perch the lake has had for some time.

It's top down.....not bottom up. The lake is out of balance and will have a die-off in the next year....maybe two as a result of once again having too many walleyes and not enough forage.

Here's harvest, or walleye kill, since I included the two most recent times when a large amount of mortality pulled a bunch of walleyes out of the lake.....starvation caused large die-offs. Anglers used to catch, clean, and eat these fish and it was tallied as harvest....but now the lake's walleyes get to slowly starve to death and not be consumed. Either way they're going to die.....Anglers catching them and eating them are better for the lake, better for the area economy, and the right thing to do. Management that reduces opportunities down to next to nothing while producing massive die-offs of the animal being managed......is pretty fukcin shifty "Management."

Moral of the story.....early ice on Mille Lacs is going to be fantastic. Between all the jumbos, and all the abundant, very hungry walleyes....it should be really good this year.


P.S. the best way to manage the lake is implementing the state limit like there was up until 1998.

[recker7676]

Going to be an unreal bite this year for early ice. Fall catch rates are 50% above average....so compared to this past summer's slow bite.....it's not up 50% from that, it's 50% above the long term average. I don't have the numbers but I'm going to guess catch rates are up 100% to 200% over this past summer, maybe even 300%, and why is that?

There's been too many walleyes left in the lake due to the mess that is co-management of the lake between the DNR and the tribes. The DNR wants to increase harvest, the tribes want to keep harvest extremely low believing that conservative harvest and stockpiling walleyes will lead to the lake eventually getting back to supporting the same levels of walleye biomass it did in the 80's & 90's. They are wrong in this concept and it frustrates the DNR to no end, but they can't really blame them for thinking that since it was former [worst] chief of fisheries [ever] Don Pereira that grilled this retardedly asinine concept into them for a dozen years that lead to the eventually buying in.

The only thing the low harvest creates is a lot of dead walleyes in the form of starvation. The notion that there needs to be a large amount of big walleyes to create significant year classes is false. It does the opposite. It produces to high of a density of fry and young walleyes that over compete for food, so they grow much slower, up until they are cannibalized by the very fish that were deliberately stockpiled to spawn and create them because there's no other forage in the lake.

The DNR still thinks everything in Mille Lacs is bottom up, when the reality is it's top down. YOY (young of year/age 0, the perch hatched this spring) and Y1 (year one/the perch that hatched spring of 2022) are gone. They have been decimated. They exist in extremely low numbers that are being depleted every moment under the surface of the lake's waters.

The good news is the massive 2013 year class has stunted out. They're in that 19" to 23" range and most likely will never grow to lengths in the upper twenties. The 2017 year class has basically caught them for size. Why is this good?

Because unlike a 26" plus fish....they can't eat a perch once it's grown to a jumbo. Once they're past 9" they're safe in the lake from anything besides a big pike, muskie, or angler which number drastically fewer than the walleyes, but more than big walleyes after every walleye over 23" died in 2020. This die off is what lead to the perch comeback, and the fairly abundant jumbo perch in Mille Lacs right now. The highest number of big perch the lake has had for some time.

It's top down.....not bottom up. The lake is out of balance and will have a die-off in the next year....maybe two as a result of once again having too many walleyes and not enough forage.

Here's harvest, or walleye kill, since I included the two most recent times when a large amount of mortality pulled a bunch of walleyes out of the lake.....starvation caused large die-offs. Anglers used to catch, clean, and eat these fish and it was tallied as harvest....but now the lake's walleyes get to slowly starve to death and not be consumed. Either way they're going to die.....Anglers catching them and eating them are better for the lake, better for the area economy, and the right thing to do. Management that reduces opportunities down to next to nothing while producing massive die-offs of the animal being managed......is pretty fukcin shifty "Management."

Moral of the story.....early ice on Mille Lacs is going to be fantastic. Between all the jumbos, and all the abundant, very hungry walleyes....it should be really good this year.


P.S. the best way to manage the lake is implementing the state limit like there was up until 1998.

Screenshot_20231105_214650_Samsung Notes.jpg

Screenshot_20231105_214737_Samsung Notes.jpg

Screenshot_20231105_215411_Sketchbook.jpg

Good old Tom landwehr helped create the mess

Sent from my SM-A146U using Tapatalk

[Fish Felon]

Tom Landwehr wasn't much of a fisherman, imo. He was a duck hunter more than anything....came from the nature conservancy if I remember right.

Don Pereira is the culprit. Hands down the biggest fukcing moron, worst chief of fisheries, and his work has collectively set fisheries science and management back a half century.

The fact that he rose to prominence and became chief of fisheries is a very telling indicator of how dumb most of these fish scientist academic types are.

And as I've always said.....the MN DNR is the best in the country, maybe the world, when it comes to studying, surveying, and assessing fish populations....they're not perfect and still have some obvious flaws, but their sampling data is very good, thorough, and reliable.

Where they fail miserably is interpretation of said data.....they often miss obvious indicators of one thing (factor) and attribute it to something else.....

.....and they're absolutely inept at creating management plans that influence fish populations as intended. A lot of their management does the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do, and when it doesn't work they stand around bewildered and come up with a half dozen different doomsday scenarios for why the population is trending downward, and never consider what should be obvious.....what changed is their management changes.....the fish are almost always fine as long as the DNR doesn't overthink regulations and fiddle-fukc with shit too much.

The best management of fish populations....walleyes in particular....is open fishing regulations that distribute harvest at least relatively across all age groups, because it'll always balance fish populations to available forage while leaving plenty of spawning stock even in the most heavily "over-harvest" scenarios.

[Drunk_Dynasty]

I hate pronouncing that last name. Puh-rer-uh. Too many constants.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[Fish Felon]

It fits him.....too many consonants in his work too. Why use simple terminology when you can create a new term no one's heard that has four times the consonants....so you can think you sound smarter and snobbishly pretend as if other people are mongoloids for not being familiar with your more tedious to say term....right before smelling your own fart like a fine glass of wine....

Fukcing Academics....they're worse than wannabe euro trash.