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Location: Vilas | I havent seen anyone mention the stocking in Vilas. I can only find records back to 1972...all these fish are "unspecified" strain. I imagine time and money were in short supply back then and obviously not the research back then as today. Could it be the DNR went to the lakes with the most muskies and got the eggs from whatever fish they could? Maybe the best strains have been watered down to the point where a 48"-49" is maxed out? |
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Posts: 238
Location: Rhinelander | I've been fishing northern WI muskie for 35 plus years, living in the northwoods and can say my unscientific observations are:
Population increase of more catachble fish at a high now
A lot more muskie fishing pressure than ever before. Walleye numbers are down, more fisherman targeting muskie.
Peak of "nice fish" 45-48" in the 90's early 2000s with a study decline since.
Average size of catachable fish is up to high 30's to low 40 inch range but less and less true "big fish".
50 inchers are not common, never were and sure as heck not now.
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Posts: 40
| Dick Sleight was right up there towards the top of the list for putting big, inland Wisconsin muskies in the boat, in the area(s) referenced in this thread, correct? In Rizzo's "All Star" book, which was written in 91, Sleight said catching fish in general was improving, with a lot due to catch and release working. But, he also said catching big fish, over 30 lbs, was much more difficult. Stated he used to get 5-6 a year over 30 lbs & now (in 91) getting 1 or 2 a year was a good year.
Personally, I think there's a lot more pressure out there today, specifically for muskies, than there was 10, 15, & 20 years ago. If inland 50's were common, we'd be hearing about them. Sure there are some good sticks that put a lot of time in that stay under the radar; but think of all the guides, lodges, tourney results and other fishermen in general that would be publicizing the hell outta an inland 50.
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Posts: 40
| Can add netting surveys over the years, to that list above--in regards to inland 50s, too. |
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Posts: 94
| Interesting read:
http://musky.com/2012Single/RizzoVilasFacts.htm
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Location: Contrarian Island | my guess, no I'm not a biologist, but..it's not that hard to figure out. less fishermen back then, equipment etc was not near what it is now, with gps, map chips, bigger faster boats... they simply were getting caught less so they could get bigger... fish are caught a lot more today per season.. compound that over their life, they simply aren't getting as big as they did back then... add in the fish that are stocked are from lakes / fish that don't even have 50s.. how can one expect their offspring to pass 50" with any regularity in todays world... I don't agree with his assessment that less fish will grow bigger fish, maybe in lakes they recieve little to no pressure, yes, but not in todays world with so many guys fishing them, less fish in a body of water would only mean those fish are getting caught all that much more and more pressure on them... |
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Posts: 13688
Location: minocqua, wi. | spin it to forage for a moment ... from my seat i see a significant increase and growth of ice fishing which pressures the forage base. from businesses, to gps, sonar, now panoptix, heaters, shelters, electric easy-to-use augers, ATV's etc... ice fishing has never been easier or less limited to barriers and the primary take is out of the forage base that never gets discussed in stocking discussions.
interested to hear the opinions on it ... good discussion to follow.
Edited by jonnysled 1/4/2019 10:21 AM
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Location: Contrarian Island | forage could be part of the equation but in my opinion it's not in the top 5... there are tons of fish for them to eat in the lakes.. ice fishing or not.
Edited by BNelson 1/4/2019 10:17 AM
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Posts: 304
| I always question the accuracy of the data from decades ago. |
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Posts: 32892
Location: Rhinelander, Wisconsin | Forage, water chemistry, lake type, river type and size. Angling pressure, competition from other species, average water temps, other factors like netting, spearing, etc. There's no one thing that will 'fix' anything, unfortunately.
Pelican Lake muskies reach 50 with relative success, but there has to be enough of them with the nr being poor to sustain a healthy population and support a trophy fishery. For over a decade stocking ceased. Now, because Pelican is a brood lake and is getting a good stocking from that purpose, it's coming back. |
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Posts: 422
Location: MN | FYI,
Out of curiosity I looked at some lunge log stats for all of Vilas county (25k fish) over time. I don't see a clear trend of fish not growing as big - seems like roughly the same size distribution overall, with a slight upshift in average size. Big fish are quite rare - roughly 1/65 caught are 48+ and 1/250-300 are 50+, a trend that is pretty consistent over time.
Notes:
- Some fish are logged back in early 70s, but OK numbers started in 1976 and good numbers started getting logged in 1985 - can't draw any conclusions regarding populations before 1976.
- I have compared the lunge log stats with DNR netting survey results on a bunch of MN lakes and found they are usually close. Mean size is typically within an inch, and size distribution has been quite close when that data is available. So... the point is that you can have some faith that the lunge log size distribution (with enough entries - 25k counts!) is usually pretty close to what is physically in the lake.
Edited by nar160 1/4/2019 11:58 AM
(no reported vs year.JPG)
Attachments
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 avg size vs year.JPG (74KB - 325 downloads)
no reported vs year.JPG (82KB - 303 downloads)
cummulative trends.JPG (30KB - 308 downloads)
last 5 yr stats.JPG (58KB - 314 downloads)
last 10 yr stats.JPG (57KB - 317 downloads)
99-08 stats.JPG (57KB - 316 downloads)
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Posts: 8792
| re: ice fishing/forage:
Jon's point makes sense. But then muskies preferred forage is nothing we're taking out of the lake. Might be an issue on the perch/panfish lakes. I don't see much that we can do to alter the size structure, but I do wonder how the 11 year heat wave (that is hopefully now behind us) might have changed things. Warm water is generally not good for muskies, but it does lead to a bit of a longer growing season. That may have bumped up growth rates some. It may also have negatively affected the spawn. We might see lower numbers of fish overall from that, which could actually benefit the larger fish in the system with (presumably) less competition for forage. |
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Location: Contrarian Island | 1 in 300 caught in vilas is over 50 in the lunge log? you sure your math is right? I'd think that is a bit off
Edited by BNelson 1/4/2019 12:50 PM
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Posts: 422
Location: MN | That's what I've got. I manually counted now to be sure, but I see 92 total fish 50+ entered all time, and 24819 total, although one fish has a length of 0 entered, so let's say 24818. 24818/92 ~ 270.
To be clear, how I selected Vilas county was Lake Inquiries --> WI --> Vilas County and then manually opened all of the lakes and copy/pasted the logs into a single spreadsheet. This is 204 different lakes, some of which have just a few fish entered. If there are Vilas lakes that for some reason are not listed as being under Vilas county, I would not be counting those. |
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Posts: 386
| Thanks for putting that together nar160. Interesting to see some of the trends. One anecdote that comes to mind from the original post was a Mississippi strain fish that got into a "non Muskie lake" through a high water event. when said fish was caught it measured somewhere in the realm of 54-56, sorry, going off memory here. Now I'm not going to put together a spread sheet or anything, but just going off reports from people I know that fish that area of the Miss as their "home water" they wouldn't typically expect to be able to catch a fish of that caliber - 50 would be big-big and 52 would be reasonably considered the potential maximum size limit(of course there's always that one mutant) . One could theorize that this individual fish was able to reach the size it was due to a lack of intra-species competition. You could also theorize that fish was one of those "mutants." I am definitely NOT and advocate for harvesting muskies, however population densities definitely need to be considered when choosing lakes to manage for trophies or just choosing which lakes to fish for trophies. |
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Posts: 31
| common: not THAT unusual |
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Posts: 31
| Whoever said that is right. Fishing was lousy then and most all were small sized, of course, they never had any time to grow...
THAT is why 50s are more common now. but not always reported, mainly because of all
of today's 'experts' who know everything about everything.... |
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Posts: 8792
| If there are WI 50's not being reported it's NOT because of the "experts", it's because the anglers don't want anyone to know where they caught the fish. There's something that has NOT changed since the 1970's and likely won't even when all of us here are long dead. |
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Location: Contrarian Island | More common now? Prove it. You have guys in this thread like Jason Mollen who fishes with Lijewski and Nate Osfar who are pretty credible saying they are not... kinda cracks me up a couple guys in this thread commenting a lot have never had a single 50 in the boat anywhere are now experts. Ahhh. Winternet.
Edited by BNelson 1/4/2019 9:49 PM
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Posts: 8792
| A buddy of mine took his fiancee out for her first time muskie fishing. She got a 53.5" on her third cast... ever.
Maybe we should bring her on board here to shed some light on the status of N/WI fisheries. Or the 10 year old kid who caught one on a nightcrawler a few years back. Pretty sure he's a muskie genius based on his average size... |
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Posts: 31
| That's a pretty good reason too! |
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Posts: 31
| what color was the crawler? |
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Posts: 762
| This thread is a good read here. I can't come at this from a scientific or biological perspective, only a long time, 40 yrs. plus northern wis. fisherman vacationer and now resident. I currently reside on a popular chain in north west wis. that operates a good twenty some resorts. Some of the changes I observed is the disappearing resort boats that I rarely see on the water. The 14 footers with the 61/2 hp. motors seem long gone. Everyone has there own boat or pontoon. It was cool as a kid because you would know where people were staying because the resorts would have there names painted on the boats. So consider that fish now had to learn how to adapt to much more noise from high powered boats and of course added fishing pressure. Like people who live next to a busy airport. What are you to do? You either adapt or you move. Well, fish do not have that option. I still believe the big fish are there, but have changed patterns, gone really deep or really deep into the heavy weeds. Has anybody tried down rigger trolling in those deep clear lakes and have we really perfected our shallow slop fishing? There is more knowledge to be learned on these monster muskies. Kdawg |
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Location: Vilas | I talked to two of the top muskie guides in Vilas at a musky show a couple years back. Between the two of them they had just under 300 muskies and none at 50". Obviously there are not many of them swimming in Vilas waters. |
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Posts: 1293
Location: Hayward, Wisconsin | Interesting discussion and many good (often unsupportable) comments made. Mr. Worrall's notation about "nr" (natural recruitment, i.e. viable spawning) is, I believe a major concern, especially in many of the hundreds of N. WI small lakes.
Another concern, from my prospective of over 60 years of dedicated muskie fishing and researching same, is that prior to the 1980's, when catch and release really started kicking in, and even beyond that for the really big muskies, the native gene pool of big muskies was "cropped off" (kept) and size and frequency of the larger of the species all but disappeared.
In Tony Rizzo's article, he alluded to something that I have often wondered about; more muskies but fewer large muskies. Due to C&R, many lakes now have a much larger population of mid 40 inch muskies and fewer (caught) over 50. A balanced fishery is considered to be like a pyramid, with the top (smaller numbers) being top predators. Has C&R now created a "diamond" shaped fishery, heavy with predators in the midsection and fewer top end predators? Or is it too late to expect a return to the days when more large trophy muskies were caught?
This thread has discussed angling pressure, which too must be considered. That is likely the reason bigger water bodies contain more big muskies...they simply have a better chance to grow large without constant pounding by anglers. While it would never fly, I wonder what a rotating multiple year closed season (5 to 10 years) would do to revive trophy fisheries. And of course, original genetics would have to be a consideration. You cannot expect water bodies that never did produce trophy muskies to start doing so even without pressure unless better genetics were introduced.
Nice work or the charts nar 160! Love that kind of data. |
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Posts: 431
| Ok my $0.02 I believe the change in numbers in both size and numbers is based on pressure . As stated technology has changed exponentially. Equipment vastly improved and media had allowed exposure. So now you have massive numbers of scientifically equipt anglers tied to real time reports fishing lakes with LIMITED populations of muskies. Now I believe that the DNR is trying to bolster these populations, but are challenged by budgets, inferior strain, and the common belief that the muskies eat all the walleyes. Plus the spearing doesnt help. I believe the fish are conditioned and have adapted and moved. There are no more dumb fish that chase anything that is thrown. These fish have seen baits, and have had speed boats driven over them time and time again. I also believe that the MAJORITY fisherman have not learned to adapt, they are still doing the same old same old. I base this on two things, first netting reports from Escanaba. I heard that the DNR has been recording lowering spring netting results over the years on the traditional spawning grounds. I also hear they, on a hunch, they tried netting on a non-typical shore and the results were very high. I have also seen this on Kinkaid where netting on new areas showed higher results than the traditional old areas. My conclusion is that the fish have moved due to netting pressure. The second thing is discussions overheard from a long time guide on LOTW who has changed tactics and has noted that his catch rates have gone up over the vast number of people who are doing the same old. I dont believe there is enough data taken to make these scientific decisions. Just my onion. |
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Posts: 8792
| Interesting theory on size structure Larry. If that is case, perhaps the key to obtaining a trophy class fishery is to allow for some harvest. If we're indeed we're seeing fewer big fish because we're putting the smal/med fish back instead of harvesting them, than that points to the big fish of yesteryear being a result of their competition winding up on the table. Talking that one step further.... If we didn't fish for them at all, what would the size structure look like? If they were all left alone to do their thing, and we had a "pyramid" type size structure like you'd expect in an undisturbed environment, would there be more big fish? |
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Posts: 1293
Location: Hayward, Wisconsin | EA: Interesting thoughts. "Some harvest"? Possibly, BUT in all size ranges, which would naturally "remove" more of the mid size fish just because there are more of them. Remember, back in the days of almost "total harvest" of legal size muskies (when the size and bags limit was 28 inches in Canada/2 per day and 30 inches if any in the states/at least 1 per day), the BIG ones were kept too. At the beginning of C&R, the big ones were kept almost to the exclusion of the mid size fish...human nature; anglers still wanted to "harvest and mount" their personal best. Just look at what happened in Green Bay when the 50's started showing up there. Almost TOTAL release has only been in vogue for about 20 years or so. Thank God for replica's! We just can't know how that continued keeping of big muskies vs. releasing mid size muskies has affected the original "pyramid" and created a "diamond" situation.
One would have to believe, if "left alone to do their thing" that a natural pyramid balance would return (but how long would it take?), but the BIGGER unknown is what the removal of those biggest fish genes has done to the overall picture. Are they still there in previous offspring, OR are they gone forever? |
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Posts: 556
| ToddM--- I fish a lot of the same area you do----- But I do see some more pressure on even those small by passed waters..... Guys drive by them because most know the chance at a 50" fish on those lakes is few and far between--------But I still do see more fisherman on the lakes and areas I have fished since the Mid 70's...…. And I would think --like mentioned with all the advance equipment todays anglers have-- That those Anglers are more advanced then 20 years ago.. Just by the equipment improvements alone. |
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Location: Vilas | Larry Ramsell - 1/6/2019 9:07 AM
but the BIGGER unknown is what the removal of those biggest fish genes has done to the overall picture. Are they still there in previous offspring, OR are they gone forever?
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right, its all about the genetics...once the big fish gene is gone, its gone... years and years of stocking from "unspecified strain" has cost us in northern Wi. Its such a watered down strain up here now..... |
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