Calling Lake: Amazing year classes, amazing numbers
 

What more can be said. Out at the Lake with Glen and Marlo fixing a furnace problem and fishing, but not in that order.

Many double headers, finally a triple header. I need better fishing partners, because we should have had a lot more triple headers.

What is amazing is the many obvious year classes, and the heavy representation in each year class. Including "Unders & Overs".

This is admittedly prime time, and the heavy winds last week have pushed all sorts of feed onto the east shore by the town site. Sometimes as shallow as 5 fow in mid day!!!???

Have fun out there. If you have some non fishing friends or young kids, get them out there.

Drewski

Well then.....guess I'll see tomorrow!

Oh man I wish I didn't have a broken leg!

Shh, slot limits clearly dont work. Our govt makes sure to remind of this regularly lol...

Can’t have big carrots if you pull all the medium carrots. Probably one of the worst analogies I’ve ever heard.

Lol, the sky is falling!!!

Somebody kept a walleye!!!!!

There's only 7 million left in the lake, we'll never eat carrots again!!!!!!

Calling lake is a prime example of what can happen with proper management and some of you are so anti catch and keep that you're blind to the success.

Haha...me too!

Dustinjoels, really???
 

The whole point of the slot is that the fish have spawned a few times before 45 cm. They have replaced themselves and then some.

If they get caught, their genetics have already passed on.

If they get past 55, and lots and lots of them do, then they are in fact the "big carrots".

Yes, I would like to see the opportunity to keep 28"++ fish for the month of August as the big ones that are caught are coming from the deep, are stressed by the warm water, and may not make it back down if released anyway.

A 28" walleye is about 8+ pds and about 17 years old. It has done its reproduction and recruitment 100 fold.

What happens to the big walleye is that they end up being caught by the FN & Metis "subsistence harvesters".

You and I do not get a chance to utilize the resource.

But the Asian Restaurants seem to benefit somehow!!! Besides, there may be some indirect sin taxes paid by the sellers!!

Lord knows, there is no enforcement for the lucky ones who get to place nets and them decide to sell fish. The mesh size used is targeting the big walleye. The small ones go through.

It clearly cost the special harvesters more in gas to get to the lake than what an equivalent week of groceries would cost. Can't understand the economics if it truly is subsistence, given the cost of net, boat, truck, gas, etc.

But yes Dustinjoels, this is who is pulling the "big carrots" from our lakes across northern Alberta.


Drewski

Well me and my GF did fish Calling on Sunday and did keep our 1 fish each....lol....all factored in that 3 lbs of clean fillet cost about as much as a crate of lobster or many many meal of fine Ahi Tuna! That's right nothing but the best for my gal!:happy0180:

I could be wrong but I believe Dustin was agreeing with us. Slot limits make sense in every way because minimum sizes just guarantee all large fish get removed but at least with slots some survive.

Spencer was another slot lake that to my understanding also has a healthy population. Aep changed the regs this year so bigger fish arent protected anymore... Would be nice if the population now struggles so a guy can finally prove that Aeps views on slot limits are ridiculous(which they are because they are all based on when they tried using reverse slots which of course doesn't work in heavy fishing pressure areas...

The point of a slot is not about individual fish or their maturity, sex, age or length. . It’s about the overall health the lake.

WHAT THE ... Mooserivertrapper?
 

The overall health of the lake is because of the reproduction of the individual walleye in the lake. If they are allowed to breed, and recruit to the population, then the lake is sustainable for recreational and non regulated fishing.

Slot sizes do in fact work, and the tag system is really only useful on small lakes or lakes with very significant fishing pressure. And then when the FN / Metis Nets hit the water where tags are allowed, or on no retention waters, totally pointless anyway.

The tag system bandwagon that AEP has been on for more than a decade is badly applied. Many of the Non retention Lakes around St. Paul, closed for as much as 15 years, is proof of that.

Baptiste Lake was converted to tags based upon a Creel Survey done in the hottest days of August. Guess what, few people caught any walleye, and the Bios said Baptiste had collapsed. Tags went on and that is the way its been.

Later test netting showed that the walleye were in fact stable, and it was a poorly done Creel survey due to the hottest days in August and the short period of time of the survey.

BUT THAT DID NOT MATTER!!! THE AGENDA WAS MAKE IT A TAGS ONLY LAKE!!!

SO if you are the bio who made the decision, you know you set this up to fail to justify your agenda, or you made a bad decision that you now refuse to reverse. No Reason Baptiste should not be on a Slot system.

I hope you are with AEP or forward this thread to them. More lakes should be on a Slot System.

Your "overall health of the lake" explanation is just a "Chicken and Egg" argument that forgets that its the strategy of allowing individual fish to reproduce while balancing the interests of recreational fishermen, that is critical.

Drewski

Slot sizes work great and ARE the answer. I haven’t understood why most lakes didn’t have a slot 10 years ago.

like

I’m all for slot limits. Maybe my last post was ambiguous. I was poking fun at the bio that gave the lecture comparing harvesting carrots to fish.

There’s no reason why slot limits wouldn’t work wonders on all the low to moderately pressured lakes in Alberta.

Dustinjoels, Mooserivertrapper: THANK YOU!!!
 

Thank you guys,

Sorry for going off on you.

I am REALLY trying to make a point here, that I have been trying to make for a very long time. Slot sizes CAN work.

At Long Lake, the Walleye took off, SRD as it then was, made it over 50 cm retention, and there were no fish over 50 cm in a few years.

IFFFFF they had a slot size, say 40 - 50, then there would have been smaller breeders and bigger breeders, but that is not what SRD did.

Now we are on the brink of a new Walleye fishery: WABAMUN LAKE.

The Bios finally realized there are TWO types of Walleye. River Spawners and Shoal Spawners. The Bios took Shoal Spawners from St. Anne and Isle, and took a bunch of Adult fish on top of taking just eggs, and the darn things have been multiplying like CRAZY!!!!

WABAMUN is a big lake and can take a lot of pressure. Is there any reason why we should not have a Slot Size on Wabamun? To test this out, they could make it RETENTION for only 1 month, and run a Creel Survey for that month, lets say JUNE 2019.

Then the Creel Surveyors could ask people to keep track of how many LITTLE ONES and how many BIG ONES they threw back, and after the boat returns, determine what the return number are of each class???

I WOULD write to the Minister with this proposal if I thought it would make a difference.

But lets face it, Minister Shannon Phillips is only interested in wind mills, LED Light Bulbs, and getting re elected.

She will not do anything for fishermen.

Drewski

I would be interested in helping organize some sort of message/petition geared towards implementing slot limits at least on a number of lakes to test the theory.

True slot limits have been tested very little and have either succeeded or had an obvious reason of failure(too small minimum size in slot etc).

I don't know what all we would have to do in order to convince either the bios or govt to make these changes but I am definitely interested in trying to do so. One of the first steps that I think would be advantageous especially if dealing with the govt route(bypassing bios) would be to get evidence/3rd party opinions from recognised bios down east etc supporting the idea that slot limits would work on our lakes.

Slots won’t work on some (most) lakes in Alberta, to small of a lake, to eager of fish and too many anglers on the water. Every fish that grows into the slot gets caught and kept. Funny how right now today with minimum size limit lakes every dam pike and walleye is about 1 cm short. Take that same lake right now and then tell people that have to throw back if the fish is over xx size does nothing because there are no fish that big in the lake. Fact.

Fact?

Proof?

Actually they opened walleye to fish over 50cm for just two weeks back then. There were 2 hour lineups at the boat launch. They did test netting after the two week season and never netted one fish over 50cm. It did not take years it only took 2 weeks to remove basically all the walleye over 50cm.

A think slots would work in some of our lakes as well. It has worked really well at Tobin lake in Sk. Probably one of the top lakes for big walleye in Canada.

Seriously?

How did you find out this info and do you have a link?

That is not a fact... In fact if you provide us with a list of lakes you claim fall into this category I bet myself and others could prove your claims are false.

You are correct that a handful of our lakes have very few fish over the minimum size and of those fish very few are over what would be a logical upper slot size. The reason for this is not because there are no fish that grow big in these lakes. The reason is because these odd fish eventually get caught and then are taken home because there isn't an upper slot size in place to protect them...

For example lets use Buck Lake which is one of the closest lakes to this example that you can get.

http://aep.alberta.ca/fish-wildlife/...eport-2017.pdf

Very few numbers of walleye over 50 cm but as can be seen there are a few fish at 55 cm which would be a logical upper slot limit on lakes close to major cities. With that upper slot those fish now would be protected, would grow even larger and would go on to spawn for many more years.

Here are some excerpts from a couple interesting research papers on the subject.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/...L%3E2.3.CO%3B2

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...1111/faf.12053

I worked a bit with Daryl Watters back then and he told me about it. Probably retired now but he might still be working.....give him a call. He did a lot of the stocking for walleye, I helped doing fin samples, and looked after the sturgeon
tagging program as well, where I did some tagging.

Never heard of him. I'm not saying I don't believe you, but I'm thinking what he told you is stretching the truth.

Believe what you like, he was involved with the fisheries in Alberta for over 30 years so I think I'll go with his information.

You can read about the Long Lake example and much more in the following report.

https://era.library.ualberta.ca/item...g%25202010.pdf

Bobalong is somewhat right. It wasn't years, it was a 24 day opening with 1 fish over 50 cm limit. It had previously been C&R and people knew there was decent fishing there, with many other lakes in the area closed to retention and restrictive changes applied to other lakes fishing pressure converged on Long Lake fishing out most of the larger fish in no time.

Imo this test barely had any value though because there was too much incentive for anglers to converge on that lake. It would be like changing Pigeon to a minimum size limit now, of course it would take an absolute hammering.

24 days, thanks for the correction.

I skimmed through the 146 pages and didn't see where all the walleye over 50cm were wiped out. Can you narrow it down to a chapter?

Even though long lake is a small lake the odds of managing to essentially remove all walleye over 50cm seem astronomical.

Page 88

Almost unbelievable that could be done.

Then when you get thinking about. The lake averages 400 yards wide, with walleye holding water up and down each shore line with no spots shallow enough for them throughout the center of the lake. Couple that with a resident population of Ukrainians summering on the lake. Quite the dent could be put into a class of walleye.