Atta boy Watson,I agree with you 100% about people with attitudes that try to take away from someone else’s experiances. In the LaCrosse area we have a run of young anglers who have become brainwashed and arrogant without knowing the consequences of their misguilded mouth working without putting thought and compassion in for the average fisherman.Taking a limit of fish of whatever size is each fisherman’ choice and should be respected.If you read alot of these posts,many people on this website fish every day and guess what,they keep afew fish. Well if you take 30 days times 10 fish you have 300 fish.So who’ hurting what?As for “TROPHY” fish, many people ‘young and old’ see fish just as they are, just fish.Only people can make individual jugdements to such.When I grew up ,they just big fish,so what.We caught alot of them back then just as now.Bass populations are at a all time high on the MISS.,thanks to the 1990 size limit.My first reel was a 202 zebco,then a 606 zebco, then a 33 so I take offense to Cade’s remarks also.If he is to become a role model he has a ways to go but we’ll give him time.I have fished bass tournaments also and I must say we bass fisherman probaly kill as many bass as anyone with our constant pressure on them every day of open water casting cranks at every inch of shoreline and bouncing them around in our livewells for miles.All told we have to live wih ourselves and respect other fisherman.We do not own the resource exclusively to our selves,at the rate we are going we will end up with QFM and that is a whole nother topic

you pepole make much ado about nothing regarding sheephead.worry more about taking undersized panfish that never had achance to spawn.as far as taking home large fish ,that what they are for if your hungry.you dont see farmers cutting down their crops before they are ripe do you , would be very smart.taking home small fish is like a cattle farmer eating all of his heifer calves,no young stock left but if he eats a couple cows, he is in good shape.if you guys are in an area with small fish,don,t use a bait with a treble hook, only common sense to try and keep next generation alive.fish populations are like crops,only they are much more fun.

I have been a visitor at this forum for some time and finally had to jump in as many of our small backwater areas have been compromised by this website. Our ice fishing on miss rvr are limited because of suitable winter habitat,leaving us vunerable to over harvest. I heard about this website from other very concerned fisherman in LaCrosse/Stoddard area. I HAVE seen IDA members also keep limits of small crappies/bluegills. Johnny Utah shoud be commended for standing up for his fishing hole. When I grew up “slab crappies” were 12″ and up – not 9″to 10″. If you are wondering how I knew they were IDA members, they were so close I could hear them talking about their next post. Shortly after posting on IDA this fishing area was overcome with fisherman so I moved on to another small backwater in LaCrosse area. Guess who showed up? The same thing happened – another post was made on IDA – so I moved on up to the north side of La Crosse. Guess what? – an area that had only 4 or 5 fishermen turned into shanty town with multiple vehicles parked there with IDA stickers. IDA is a great site if fishing information is discreet however in our small backwater areas any information shared on this site is like putting a flag pole out in the middle of the ice saying “come here, the fish are biting”. I have noticed a lot of IDA members live up north or in big lake areas where if you gave the name of the lake it is just a lake name, not a specific spot. As this website manager stated “The Staff here is very critical and aware of identifying spots exact locations”. As for bait shop hot spots, any experienced fisherman knows at best their information is two weeks old. Because of recent posts on this website about the LaCrosse area many local fisherman have been disappointed by crowds that are drawn to these areas due to the internet postings. We have learned that many people follow this website exclusively to get there information on latest “hot spots”. Our fishery has taken a beating because in the river environment fish school in backwater areas and we now are experiencing over fishing. It’s too bad we can’t go find fish — without being followed.