Just refer to the telemetry study done by the DNR for all the info you need…. it’s in the article archive here on IDA.
I have read the Telemetry study James is referring to and it is good reading. I don’t know the River near as well as James does but I do fish a lot of Spring Tournaments down there and can usually figure out a pretty good prespawn, spawn and post spawn pattern. I have to agree, there are A LOT of fish that do not get close to the dam for spawning.
Also, those fish with eggs dripping out have already spawned out, you are seeing residual eggs if you are seeing any. I, for one, rarely see them!
Wisconsin’s reluctance to implement slot limits on the Mississippi would probably explain why Minnesota doesn’t bother with them. I have never fished the river between Dubuque and New Albin, so I never really think about how the regulations are different there, or why they are different.
I don’t know if Wisconsin had a reluctance to implement slot limits on the river. From what I understand the Wisconsin DNR did not see a numbers problem on the river like the Iowa DNR did. The protected slot limit that Iowa has now is there to protect the prime female egg producers. These are the females between around 3 Lbs to 7 Lbs or 20″ to 27″ fish. I am very happy about the protected slot. I released many fish over 20″ last year and hope to catch and release even more this year. The best thing about the protected slot is that EVERYBODY has to release these fish whether they want to or not. I work with a guy who caught a 26-1/2″ walleye off of the Eagle Point Fishing Barge last spring and even though he really didn’t want to release the fish he had to. He was so angry for the next two weeks that he had to release that fish. He got over it when I showed him a photo of a 29-1/2″ walleye that I released about this time last year. The numbers of trophy size walleye in this stretch of the river can only increase as will the numbers of eggs/fry that they produce. Hopefully it all means a stronger fishery for many years to come. Now if we could only cut the number of barges.
Eyehunter
I also agree with you eyehunter, WI didnt see a decrease in the number on walleyes on the river as Iowa saw. I also believe MN has no intentions on changing the regulations. Because they havent seen a decline. I fished pool 4 and 5 most of the time and I grew up fishing pool 10. I fished Pool 10 a couple times this year and the walleye fishing was just unbelievable. The best I have ever seen.
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I also agree with you eyehunter, WI didnt see a decrease in the number on walleyes on the river as Iowa saw. I also believe MN has no intentions on changing the regulations. Because they havent seen a decline. I fished pool 4 and 5 most of the time and I grew up fishing pool 10. I fished Pool 10 a couple times this year and the walleye fishing was just unbelievable. The best I have ever seen.
I’ve fished Pools 5a through 8 for many years, and the walleye fishing there is really good–better than it seems to be down here on Pools 16-17. I can’t help but wonder what it would be like with a slot limit, though.
Hey KornKing! I’ve witnessed what I have witnessed. No I’m not a tree hugger so instead of going out to Oregon I wish to take Steve Vik’s pickup truck with all the gut barrels from just two days of fishing by his resort guests and drive to your house to dump them in your bed. Thanks for labeling me on the site to your expectations I’m sure you are a good guy at least sometimes! 
I have witnessed the decline of walleye fishing on pool 4 over the years. It is still good but it has declined. I hope you do not witness a real crash in your liftime of fishing. Good luck to you. 
Bring ’em on. 
I’ve got a pile of cats in my barn that would love the fresh protein in their diet, especially after a long winter’s worth of mice and Purina… 
Being as they were originally east-coast, Atlantic seaboard cats from Maryland; they especially like to eat, ahem, stale, or rather should I say rotten m-a-k-e-r-a-l.
Besides adding some variety to my barn cats diet, I could use the fish remains much as the Native Americans did, in order to fertilize my vegetable garden organically. 
See, we’re really not too different after all? 
Do you think my wife will let me hire that 19 year old scantily-clad hippie-chick in the tree to help me spread the fish guts on the fields? 
Dude, you’ve labled yourself by the type of obnoxious, militant posts you pollute this otherwise decent and amicable site with. 
StaleMackrel, I’m very interested in your raw data, can you post it?
Thanks.
You are probably right but we have caught a lot of Walleyes and Sauger in April with spawn. The thing that really bothers me is some tend to inhale the hook so deeply that CPR does not work. My preference would be to close the season during peak spawning time, but I am not a pro. On the other end of the spectrum is all these people that keep Sauger, regardless of size and whether they have spawn in them, but I guess that is a slightly different topic.
I fish pools 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 & 14 each year and make a couple trips up to pool 4, 5, & 5A every year as well. The last couple of years I have had my best walleye fishing on pools 12, 13 & 14. I live on pool 12 so it makes sense that I catch the majority of my fish there. There are 2 or 3 year classes of walleye that had good to great hatches down here and these fish all seem to be between 15″ and 22″. The best of these hatches are the fish that are now around 22″ and none of these fish can be kept due to the slot limit. Just think how big many of these fish will be in 2 or 3 years. I did not catch a great deal of fish under 15″ last year which probably means there was a down year as far as the hatch goes a couple years ago. Pool 13 at Bellevue has always been one of the best walleye fisheries on this stretch of the river and it seems every time I go down there I do well. Pool 14 at Clinton has also been a great walleye fishery. I don’t think pool 14 gets as much fishing pressure as some of pools further north. Pool 14 has also been stocked by the Cordova nuclear plant for many years which helps with numbers of walleye. I have fished several tournaments on pool 14 and the numbers of fish brought in to the scales exceeds the numbers on any other pool I have fished tournaments on. The last 2 or 3 tournaments I fished there almost every boat brought in their limit. It is also the pool that I caught the most legal size fish I have ever caught in a day. It is hard to justify the 60 mile drive though when I can stay in Dubuque and catch as many walleye as I have the past couple of years. With the gas prices as high as they are I will be sticking even closer to home this year.
Eyehunter
Last summer on pool 14 I caught and released more 20-26″ fish than I have in any two other years combined. Some may be due to a better proficiency at finding and catching them, but a great deal of this, I am sure, is due to the slot limit. Many of these fish would previously have been consumed before I had a chance to find them.
In my opinion, pool 14 has been a very good southern fishery for years, but I am supremely confident that in the very near future, it will become a great trophy fishery as well as provide even better numbers of fish throughout the size spectrum.
In some years, I have noticed as much as one in three or four fish I catch in a day have been released by the stocking program Eyehunter mentioned. If we can bolster the spawn by releasing the most prolific breeding females, it can only get better!
All this being said, I have no intention of ceasing to feed my trophy hunt addiction because fish are preparing to spawn. On the contrary, I hit the water as much as I can in the hope of finding, photoing, and releasing some trophy fish!
Good discussion 
John,
Pools 12, 13 & 14 can only get better which is difficult to imagine because they have been so good the past few years. I don’t know how much of an impact the slot limit has had as of yet as last year was the first year it was implemented. We should start to see this season what kind of impact it has had by the numbers of fish we catch in the protected slot. I know what you mean about releasing so many in the protected slot last year. I would have to guess that I released as many as 50+ walleye from 20″ to 29-1/2″ long. Most of these were in the 20″ to 24″ range with a few 26″ fish mixed in from time to time. I still had no problem finding plenty of eater fish between 15″ and 20″.
The nuke plant also stocks a few of the fingerlings in pool 13 every year but not near as many as they put in pool 14. The Iowa DNR does their creel counts at Bellevue and they said that the number of branded fish brought in was less than 3% of all the walleye they counted and measured. I did catch a limit at Bellevue a couple years ago and at least half of the fish were branded fish. I never would have noticed if the guy doing the counting had not pointed them out to me. The past couple of years the walleye club has also been getting a few thousand of these fingerlings from the nuke plant and stocking them in pool 12 at DBQ. These fish have a double bar brand on them and they have done well as we have caught several of them ove rthe past couple of years. The first batch they stocked should all be legal sized fish this year as we caught several just shy of 15″ last fall.
With the stocking programs, the closed seasons, the protected slot limits and the reduced aggregate bag limit we should have a fantastic walleye and sauger fishery for many years to come. And I used to think I had to go to northern Minnesota to catch walleye. 
Eyehunter
Ya gotta love it! 
I don’t see the difference between catching and keeping a 20 inch Walleye with eggs or catching and keeping her six months earlier. Either way you have a dead fish that will not spawn. The fishery can either handle it or it cannot handle it. It’s the same with deer hunting. You shoot a doe and it will not have fawns the next year. What’s the difference if you shoot it in November when deer are mating? The deer herd is doing quite well as are the walleyes in the River system. For the record I support releasing the larger walleyes and it should be done year round. However, as long as people follow the fishing regulations for the water they are fishing I have no problem with what they choose to do. A slot limit of 20-27 inches is a good idea.
Andy,
Very well put. I am totally in agreement.
At last…a post that is honest and I can totally agree with.
Amen, Andy!!
D. Andrews
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