HnkrCrash wrote:Obviously anyone in charge of the management plan is neither a math major nor has any damn clue as to how things actually work from an angling perspective.
I'll disagree with you there, I actually think the management is very good and staffed with very good biologists that are also very good mathematicians.
The problem is all the idiot resort owners creating political pressure that then dictates the management plan.
Any research and scientific data, and subsequent management plan based from it, indicating anything other than netting as the problem is not accepted.
It's impossible to have a civil conversation and discuss Mille Lacs to any person truly invested in the lake. I start every conversation before going into it with, "obviously netting is a huge factor and probably the biggest...BUT besides that what can be done about the other factors like X, Y, Z...A, B, C, D, E, F......."
I always preface the conversation with the rehearshed netting BS dialogue that I truly don't believe and know based off factual scientific data not to be true simply because you have to know your audience if you're trying to connect with them, and it still doesn't matter.
Netting is the problem---that's it.
Unless you have your head up your azz and agree with that sentiment, you're opinion, just like the opinions of the excellent team put in place to manage the lake, doesn't matter.
HnkrCrash wrote:The other thing that completely dumbfounds me is the planned lake dedicated walleye hatchery. Based on nearly everything I've read there are plenty of walleyes hatched, the vast majority just get canabalized before they reach maturity. A walleye hatchery only serves to continue the use of walleyes as baitfish for other walleyes. Wouldn't it be smarter to have a perch hatchery?
Agreed. I voiced that same sentiment from the get-go.
When you have the governor speaking in front of the lake flanked by the commissioner of the DNR and he's pushing for a holding special session to pass welfare that would have made a nagger from Norf cringe in its level of waste and precedence for subsidizing total losers, that's not a good sign for the future of the lake. Even worse was when they started elaborating on the state of the art fishery with a cost of $8,000,000 to build with no idea of the long term cost of annual funding. I have no idea what it costs to operate a facility like that; power, heating, cooling, procuring stock, growing stock, releasing stock, computers, desks, phones, water system and aeration system, staffing a team of employees...it has to be phucking astronomical. I'm guessing a million annual easy.
All to dump fry into a lake where all the scientific data and research clearly shows the bottleneck in producing a walleye population to support several-hundred-thousand-pounds of them being taken from the lake each year is them cannabilizing their young---predating on and consuming the majority of the fry from each year class until it no longer exists.
The plan to fix the lake is spending untold millions on fish food. There is next to zero percent chance those fry grow big enough to be caught on a hook in significant numbers to impact the problem.
The experts supposedly managing the lake didn't create or decide on that plan. Politicians are responsible for that plan at the behest of a small group of freeloaders that don't want to work for a living. They want a guaranteed way to make money, easily. Being challenged with reinventing a business handed down to them in most cases, target a new demographic of consumers, diversify the reach of their business plan...are what these losers have refused to do. They'd rather spend countless hours bitching each day instead of using that time in a productive manner. They'd rather invest nothing but vitriol and hate for the DNR and Indians. Great business model! I'm shocked it hasn't worked and created a windfall of cold hard cash for them yet.....
The lake is currently being managed backwards, in my opinion. The general concept is to keep as many walleyes in the lake as possible by protecting them. The problem is a diminished forage base that will be forever diminished due to lake changes (mass reduction of phytoplankton by zebes that isn't the beginning of the food chain, but it's foundation, no chain or hierarchy exists without it). Instead of protecting walleyes from harvest we should be ensuring lots of fish are removed freely from the lake. Mille Lacs would be better served by a 6 walleye limit with one over 20" allowed, the state general limit.
It'd allow the lake to bottom out by being over fished instead of bottoming out by stockpiling so many fish the populations of forage species crash subsequently causing the walleye population to crash. There'd be good and bad years, maybe more bad than good, but it'd be better than what we currently have. In good years anglers would flood the lake to rape and pillage, in bad years there'd still be more than now. The timeline for bottoming out and recovering would be quicker because the baitfish population wouldn't always be in a decimated state.
Right now the lake is chalk full of chunky 14"-16" walleyes from the 2013 year class. They exist in numbers so vast they have already started decimating the level of forage abundant up until a year ago, a result from their explosion after the crash of large walleyes. The 2013 fish will start starving soon, along with the currently healthy and fat survivors of previous year classes.
I'm going to catch, keep, clean and eat hundreds of walleyes from Mille Lacs this summer. It's going to be my summer of love on the big pond. I encourage everyone else to do the same. Why not fish one of the premier walleye lakes when it's full of hungry eater sized walleyes and no one else is out there!? If you can't figure out how to get a bunch of walleyes off the lake without getting caught shoot me a pm and I'll give you some tips on methods that have been very effective for me. Nothing is full proof but I haven't been caught yet.
The latest poachers device I just concocted and tested the prototype has me excited. I shouldn't have any issues putting the knife to how ever many walleyes I put on a stringer in a day (hoping for a few 50+ fish cleaning parties).