Steve’s comments bring to mind a strange experience we’ve had on Lake Osakis during the past decade. It used to be a conservation lake that the DNR harvested for walleyes (quite awhile ago, I think). My girl’s family has had property there for 30 years and they’ve fished that lake for most of that time. When we first moved to Minnesota 10 years ago, she told me all about the 1 – 2 lb. sunfish and giant crappies that they used to take out of the lake. She couldn’t wait to get up to the cabin and start fishing for them in the spring of the first year we were here. That was back in 1992. From that year until 1999, we never pulled a sunny out of the lake that was bigger than 1/2 pound.
We hunted hard, her dad hunted along with us and we never had any luck in finding the fish. Once in awhile, we’d run into a school of crappies that were good-sized, but nothing like what they said had been there. Apparently, the “giants” had disappeared. We talked to other fishermen, many of whom spent 3 or 4 days a week on the lakes and they were just as mystified by the disappearance of the big ones. They blamed the lack of fish on a huge amount of overfishing in 1991, saying that everyone had taken too many of the big ones and that they figured there might not be any more in the lake.
All of a sudden, in 1999, we started catching giant spring sunfish again. Same places as before, and nests started appearing all over the lake, some in places where we’d never seen any. The sunnies were back in huge numbers and we were seeing some full-blown 1 1/4 pounders that practically jumped into the boat.
Where could they have gone? Obviously, the fish hide out a lot and people can’t always find them. Osakis doesn’t have any huge inlets or outlets where they could have gone, so the answer has to lie in the lake itself. I’m beginning to think that the same thing occurs on regular cycles in many lakes. It could be a pattern that results from weather, where the fish stay deeper during various long-term conditions and are only brought back around by changes in average temp, clarity and so forth. It no longer surprises me that the fish would disappear and suddenly reappear or that a particular year-class might suddenly seem to be gone at some point. We’d never be able to locate them without some sort of long-term study that would happen to include the conditions that caused them to be gone in the first place.
My dad used to be an organic chemist for Dow and participated in the development of a lot of the Ag products on today’s market. He once said that over 300 compounds were developed each year and maybe one of them would work on something. Constant testing and “accidental” experiments were the only way to find out for sure. That’s probably the only way we’ll ever really figure out what patterns fish develop, too, or how they act in the constantly varying conditions that we see on the river.
Sorry for the babbling. Obviously, I spend way too much time thinking about the catching during the winter and not enough time fishing. It would be interesting to compare records and start some sort of long term survey, though.
Mike
