Walleyes for Tomorrow

[pclark]

I became involved in our local chapter of "Walleys for Tomorrow" this year. Planning starts in February and there are many local chapters in Wisconsin, ours is on Manitowish Waters, WI. The process involves a lot help in the way of Trailers to incubate the eggs, boats, nets, and volunteers to run their local chapter. The end result is hopefully recharging the walleye population in your lake or in our case the chain of 10 lakes that we call home. The process is wait for ice out which was May 5th this year, place nets out strategically, check nets and bring back males and females during the spawning stage and collect an agreed upon amount to start the incubation process. When all the walleyes have been processed they are documented, clipped, and returned to the lake after donating sperm and eggs. We then incubate the eggs for 28 days before releasing them into lakes that don't have good reproduction rates on our chain.

The website is https://walleyesfortomorrow.org/about-wft/

Hopefully these pictures download and it shows some of the works of the program, to read more about it please go to the website if you are interested.

 

[whitedust]

A good cause for sure but as long as the Indians excercise their tribal spearing rites to spear during the spawn it’s an up hill battle.

 

[pclark]

Interesting thought, I look at the modern indians and it appears that they are more interested in cooking meth, using it, and selling it than spending time spearing walleyes. I know it still happens but the temperrature on spearing around here has cooled down recently. Can't really say or comment about other areas in the Northwoods. These are not your Grandfathers Indians anymore is what I am trying to say.

 

[whitedust]

Why do you think the walleye population got so depleted in Vilas? Years and years of Indian spearing during the spawn. I have Indian friends , good people, but they ain’t going to give up spearing rights they have quotas and usually fill those quotas on listed lakes. Vilas County News used to publish the lakes and the quotas allowed. I know many private organizations are doing a lot to rebuild walleye populations and that’s a good thing but spawn spearing WILL be a problem. Since you’re a full time Vilas resident now you should look into Indian spearing rites concentrate on lakes they can’t spear.

 

[pclark]

Why do you think the walleye population got so depleted in Vilas? Years and years of Indian spearing during the spawn. I have Indian friends , good people, but they ain’t going to give up spearing rights they have quotas and usually fill those quotas on listed lakes. Vilas County News used to publish the lakes and the quotas allowed. I know many private organizations are doing a lot to rebuild walleye populations and that’s a good thing but spawn spearing WILL be a problem. Since you’re a full time Vilas resident now you should look into Indian spearing rites concentrate on lakes they can’t spear.

Yes, I understand that. I was just noting that things do change with generations.

 

[pclark]

We wrapped up distributing 750,000 walleye fry this morning to an area lake. Our eggs hatched very quickly due to that warm spell we had last weekend. It all happened in 14 days from incubation this year. It was said to me that only about 5,000 of these will survive to become adult walleyes but I believe it is worth the cause as the DNR does not do much stocking anymore. Walleye fishing has been very good this year at night after 8pm, minimum is 15", you can take 3. We have lots of 13", 14", 14.5" walleyes that are sent back to grow bigger.

 

[rph130]

I'm not a biologist or a math major but that ratio sounds pretty sad. Is that a normal mortality rate for the number of fish stocked or just an educated guess?

 

[pclark]

I'm not a biologist or a math major but that ratio sounds pretty sad. Is that a normal mortality rate for the number of fish stocked or just an educated guess?

It is a low ratio but think about it, you are introducing a walleye fry that is about 1/4" in length into an environment that has so many fish/creatures to eat them that this is what it is. I believe that it is a guestimate from a formula but if we can get 5,000 plus to survive and make it every year our population gets better and better. The DNR sets the limits for eggs being harvested (go figure) or we could easily do 5 times that number.

 

[goofy600]

As Whitedust has stated besides northern Wisconsin also the UP has same issues with the spearing. And the stupid thing is if one band of Indian’s don’t meet there quota other bands will travel to lakes that they normally don’t fish just to make sure they take everything they can out of every lake they can. Also big thing in UP 2020 because of covid the government didn’t allow any stocking so that also hurt.

 

[pclark]

Walleyes for Tomorrow....2023 as started. Beginning 2 weeks ago we netted the walleyes, bot male and female and collected sperm and eggs. Estimates said we had about 1,000,000 million eggs, they spent the last 9 days in the hatching process and we started to see walleye fry on Friday. We released 200,000 walleye fry into one of our lakes today, more will be released on Sunday and the will continue until they are all gone which we think will be Wednesday next week. We are starting to see results of stocking and replenishment come to fruition, this year many nights can be spent catching 20-40 walleyes, some nights have bag limits of 3 over 15" with most be 16" healthy fish. Last year we would catch the same amount and sometimes only have one legal fish over 15". This has taken years but is working and is nice to see. Couple pics, the first one is where the fry come out of the incubation tubes in the trailer to the large tubs outside, we then pull them from the tubs and place them in buckets to be transported to the final drop lake. If you can enlarge the yellow bucket pic you will see the fry near the edge around the surface, they are only about 1/8" long.

 

[whitedust]

Good work!

 

[pclark]

Good work!

Thanks Pete!

 

[skiroule]

This is pretty cool and it sounds like it's producing results. Nice work!

It's interesting how lakes differ on the bite. When I used to fish Mille Lacs, it was pretty much the norm that the Walleye fishing was always better at night. Up here on Lake of the Woods, basically no one fishes after dark. You see some guys come in pretty late but they're always on the way in before it gets dark.

 

[pclark]

This is pretty cool and it sounds like it's producing results. Nice work!

It's interesting how lakes differ on the bite. When I used to fish Mille Lacs, it was pretty much the norm that the Walleye fishing was always better at night. Up here on Lake of the Woods, basically no one fishes after dark. You see some guys come in pretty late but they're always on the way in before it gets dark.

Yes, I think we are making progress which is awesome. You can catch walleyes during the day but results here have always been better at night for me anyway. Last night we were out from 7:30pm to 10pm and only caught 10 walleyes, none legal but in the 14"-14-3/4" range and looked really healthy. Looking forward to seeing pics from your season Skiroule!

 

[goofy600]

So I got to go walleye fishing for the first time, with neighbor on lake Gogebic. Started slow but by end of the day we caught about 50 but only 4 keepers. Probably over half were 14-14 1/2. It was really a good time.

 

[pclark]

So I got to go walleye fishing for the first time, with neighbor on lake Gogebic. Started slow but by end of the day we caught about 50 but only 4 keepers. Probably over half were 14-14 1/2. It was really a good time.

Glad you got to go Jim and experience it. The chain you live on is really a good walleye body of water, at least it was many years ago when we fished it. Thousand Island Lake has some really nice size walleyes in it, we did best fishing at night and netted some 6+lb fish out of there. Cisco Lake is also decent. Been along time since I have been up there, looks like there a lot of new places now but still pretty out in the wilderness which is good.

 

[euphoric1]

I used to be a avid Lake Michigan fisherman, fished a lot of tournaments and was out on the big pond as much as I could be. Now with a place up north and running a shop those days are over. I recently picked up a smoker craft bass boat and I have been watching "lake link" checking out reports on various lakes in our area up north and one thing I found interesting was "the best times to fish" and how random the timing was and how often the times were within times you would think not to be out on water fishing. Fishing the big lake it was always "dawn" or just before "dusk" that were best fishing times, unless you were 15 miles out in 300 plus feet of water, then it didn't matter. My question is... about these "best fishing times" does anyone put any faith in these? or follow them? as I said many times they are during periods you wouldn't be out on the water fishing.
I apologize.... wasn't thinking, this really didn't belong under this topic.

 

[pclark]

I used to be a avid Lake Michigan fisherman, fished a lot of tournaments and was out on the big pond as much as I could be. Now with a place up north and running a shop those days are over. I recently picked up a smoker craft bass boat and I have been watching "lake link" checking out reports on various lakes in our area up north and one thing I found interesting was "the best times to fish" and how random the timing was and how often the times were within times you would think not to be out on water fishing. Fishing the big lake it was always "dawn" or just before "dusk" that were best fishing times, unless you were 15 miles out in 300 plus feet of water, then it didn't matter. My question is... about these "best fishing times" does anyone put any faith in these? or follow them? as I said many times they are during periods you wouldn't be out on the water fishing.
I apologize.... wasn't thinking, this really didn't belong under this topic.

We use the solunar tables quite a bit to fish the major times slots, the days around the full moon are typically pretty good.

 

[rph130]

Years ago, I took my nephews out fishing for muskies on our lake. I explained the solunar table to them and told them to figure out the major feeding period for the next day. We went out at the start of the major and both of them caught a musky within minutes of each other. Luck ? Maybe but I'm a believer in it.