Here’s an article from a recent EC Leader Telegram:
DeLong Middle School seventh-graders Nate Stanford, Andrew Ziel and Michael Patt stood knee deep in Lake Wissota Friday morning in heavy rubber chest waders. They scooped 10-inch muskies from a holding pen into a plastic bucket with long-handled nets.
The students were there for a science class. They also were participating in an experimental fish stocking program that may restore the prominence of Wisconsin’s state fish by the time the students are adults.
“I’ve heard they grow faster, and they’re going to be bigger,” said Patt, 13.
“These ones have different stripes,” Ziel said.
Wissota is one of four or five lakes in the state receiving a new strain of muskies from Minnesota. They are expected to grow larger and perhaps reproduce better than strains of muskies currently in the lake.
For years the Wisconsin DNR has been using brood stock from Bone Lake in Polk County to stock many lakes in the western part of the state, and those fish haven’t been growing very fast, said Larry Ramsell, a Hayward guide who came to Lake Wissota for the event.
Ramsell and other muskie anglers have been after the DNR to try stocking a particularly fast-growing strain of muskie from Leech Lake in Minnesota that have been responsible for some excellent big-muskie catches.
Ramsell said that, although it’s painful to admit as a Wisconsin guide, when someone asks him where to go to catch a trophy muskie he points them toward Minnesota. “If someone wants a trophy fish, they don’t have a reasonable expectation of catching one here,” Ramsell said.
This year, after some negotiations with muskie anglers, state fish managers agreed to allow the clubs to stock the Leech Lake strain in a few lakes that do not have natural muskie reproduction.
Local fish manager Joe Kurz nominated Lake Wissota. The lake is stocked annually with muskies, but Kurz said he has not documented any natural reproduction there or in the Chippewa River downstream from Wissota.
Also, some members of the Chippewa-Falls based First Wisconsin Chapter of Muskies, Inc., were eager to try the muskie strain. The problem was that muskie clubs and states all over the country wanted to do the same thing, explained Fred Johnson of the club.
At first they were told that all the muskies were spoken for, but a commercial hatchery in Alexandria, Minn., had a good year and had some extras. The club bought 500 at about $10 each.
The young muskies were transferred to a net in the lake to get acclimated at the boat landing at the Chippewa Rod and Gun Club on the lake’s west side. The students went along, each in a different boat.
They said they volunteered for this mission because they all liked to fish, although they said they usually don’t go after muskies. “I just like to fish in general,” Ziel said.
Then, with the help of the DeLong crew, the fish were scooped up in batches of 50, fin-clipped or injected with tags for later identification.
Volunteers stocked half the muskies in Little Lake Wissota and half in the main lake.
Kurz thinks they will grow. “I predict you’ll have 45-inch fish in seven years and 50-inch fish in 10 years and lots of them,” he said.
