R.I.P. Walleye # 16875

I found a big girl floating near the boat landing and it was tagged. I submitted the tag info and this was the response I received:

Gary,

The walleye that you found was a female, 28.2 inches long, tagged by the Poynette Fish Management crew on March 19, 2012 near the Fox Run boat landing. The tagging location is around 20 miles upriver from Whalen’s Grade, so the fish moved a good distance between its initial tagging and where you found it.

Thanks for the tag info.

Nate Nye

P Nathan J. Nye

Fisheries Biologist, Columbia and Sauk Counties

FM-Poynette

Bureau of Fisheries Management

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

It sure would be cool if they created an app showing tagged fish and locations where they were caught.

You would probably find me floating if I swam 20+ miles too!

In all seriousness though, hopefully she spawned succesfully and has put some more good fish into the system! Its amazing how far they will travel for the size they are.

(Other than being dead)She appeared to be robust and in good condition and was clearly not full of spawn. No evident signs of injury or disease. Perhaps mishandled by an angler or kept out of the water too long for pictures…Rigors of the spawning process.. Who knows?

An author from Minnesota wrote a book titled Beneath the Surface. This gentleman tracked walleyes with the MnDNR permission and published the information in his book. I highly recommend his work.

How was the fishing? I haven’t heard of many reports from out there.

There has been a decent bite regardless of seemingly never ending East winds. There’s a lot of water coming down right now but I have been scratching fish shallow fairly regularly on crank baits. It seems evenings have been better but there have been other productive times as well. Before the rains and the rising water we enjoyed an excellent bite in the river on Slow Death rigs in the main channel with decent numbers of keeper sized fish. The crappies moved into the fingers last week and it has provided quite a few fish fries for those folks targeting them. I predict that if we get a few consecutive days of warmer weather to bring up the water temps a bit it will take off and the typical May patterns of crank baits/planer boards in shallow water or draggin’ for them when they get spooky will produce.