15 / 5 wisconsin panfish regulation

bigpike wrote:

A working stiff with a family of four can’t even get away for a couple hours and come home with enough fish to feed his family a meal.

‘Working stiff’ could bring along some of his kids to fish with him or his wife and they would have plenty of fish to eat.

Or working stiff could use his money to buy food for his family. The ‘feed my family’ argument is completely invalid. The number of people who buy a fishing license to feed their families in Minnesota/WI is probably pretty close to zero.

How long does it take you to catch the 50 fish you want to stuff in your freezer to ‘feed your family’? By the time you factor in preparation, travel, fishing, travel home, and cleaning fish, you are probably looking at 3 hours minimum. Probably closer to 5 or 6 though.

‘working stiff’ could probably have made $50-$150 in that same timeframe and fed his family for a week. Or take them out for a nice dinner.

If someone needs to feed their family that bad, a weekend job or 2nd job is going to be a much more effective way to put food on the table.

I’m not saying that it’s more fun or anything, but if I hear this ‘how are people supposed to feed their families’ thing one more time, I will crap my pants. “Boo hoo, these new limits from the meanies at the DNR isn’t allowing me to feed my family. I can’t even pull my $20,000 boat with my $30,000 truck to the lake 3 hours north to catch a meal. What ever will I do?”

I am not trying to poke fun on anyone that’s down on their luck or struggling financially.

I AM trying to argue that if someone is truly having trouble providing for their families, spending a day fishing for 7″ sunfish to do so is probably not the most efficient way to do so.

Simply take a look at Waubay Lake. They had 25 fish limits and guys pounded that. Now it is just a shadow of what it was. The GFP caught the decline to late and changed it to 15. I still think that 15 is too many….but that’s JMO. I’d love to see this 15/5 rule in SD for bluegills and crappies at least.

I’ve seen the same thing on a local lake Joel and we have a 10 fish limit [still 25 on the Miss. River though]. I’ve seen the net sample results from the dnr on the lake spread over several years and one can see the decline in larger fish. We still see some very nice crappies but I feel the average size has shrunk.

I took my concerns to the dnr and we had a nice discussion about what might be the answer as far as turning the trend around and a 10 fish limit with no more than 5 crappies and/or five sunfish can be had to make up the limit, however 10 perch could be had to make the limit. It would leave a lot of room for mixed bag combinations and I am all for it but the talks got tabled for a while.

Special regs are hard to get put on specific water here but I’d love to see this lake get them so the remaining larger fish can at least stay in stable numbers.

Rule needs to apply statewide. This is needed especially during spawning. Size and number of quality fish will improve.

If a WI family can’t live off of the 15/5 rule for panfish, switch to catfish. Most limits are either 10 or 25 fish. Doesn’t matter if the fish are 10 or 50 pounds and I think 10 thirty pound fish will feed a family for a week…or two…x 3 per day.

Because I’m on the border waters where the cat limit is 25, I’m in favor of dialing back limits.

Now I know each body of water is different, but there’s a couple “nature groups” that are really pushing for a draw down on Pool 3 of the Mississippi. Drawing down water levels to a target of 16″ (they would do more if it weren’t for the mandatory 9′ channel) helps with weed growth according to these groups, the DNR’s and the Corp of Engineers.

PS Riverruns, Pool 4 has record numbers of panfish.