What happened to Wab should be fairly obvious to most that fished it regularly.
There was a huge population of pike of all sizes. If you fished for bigger fish you would catch them almost every trip. If you fished for smaller fish you would catch a ton of them. We aren't talking catching 10 or 20 fish in a day, we were talking the ability to catch 50+ pike in an evening after work with a number of them in the 5+ lb range and a few 10-15+ if you knew what you were doing.
C&R mortality was an issue but with healthy populations of small and medium size fish the larger fish dying from C&R were quickly replaced by younger fish and it was a balanced ecosystem.
Then they stocked 11 million walleye in the lake. The forage base which was already stretched thin due to the high numbers of pike was decimated. The small/medium size pike that were caught were starving and the walleye were stunted because of this. A bunch of these pike then died off while the larger pike that primary feed on whitefish, perch and now small walleye were still healthy. The problem is that when these larger pike died off due to natural causes or C&R mortality there was now no medium size fish growing like crazy to replace them.
Now a few years later there are very few big pike left. The odd medium size pike that survived through the tough times and some smaller fish. It is good to see the reports that the smaller fish are getting healthier again which means the ecosystem is balancing out again. The lake will slowly continue to fix itself as these fish continue to grow older and bigger now.
It will still take 10+ years to get this lake back to the pike fishery it was. It will be 15+ years of substandard fishing because of our fisheries departments ineptitude. Completely unacceptable and something anglers would be wise not to readily forget. This is not the first lake that has seen a massive pike population decline in the name of trying to increase walleye populations. Will walleye ever be opened up to general limits? Highly unlikely. Maybe tags or else will stay C&R in which case hopefully it grows some trophy walleye and doesn't just remain a lake with a bunch of small walleye like say Sylvan has.
|