Walleyes Forever |
Canyon Ferry netting wrapup for Canyon Ferry netting efforts From ERIC ROBERTS Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks We ended the walleye tagging season when we pulled the last two Merwins on Friday, May 9. As you were well aware, Mother Nature really made trapping extremely difficult this spring. Between April 2 and May 9 (38 days) we were only able to fish 17 days (we fished 29 days in 2007). Whenever we would get our gears up and running a storm would blow in and shut down our entire operation. The longest we were able to keep even one Merwin up and fishing was a stretch of 7 days from April 8-14. On April 15th a major storm blew in and sunk a pontoon on one of the traps (we were able to salvage everything). We were up and fishing again by April 17 just in time for a winter storm to hit on the 19th. We were only able to get another 6 days of trapping in following the winter storm. As you can well imagine, we didn't catch many fish with the Merwins either pulled in or blown into shore 45% of the time. In total we caught 63 walleye, 24 of which we tagged with $75 reward tags. We recaptured one fish with a reward tag from 2007 and one fish that was tagged in the 2005 walleye festival. Catch was dominated by males, which made up 68.2% of the catch, immatures made up 28.6%, and females made up 3.2%. The average male was 15.8-inches long. The largest fish captured was a female that measured 29.5-inches and weighed 11.2 pounds. The largest male was 25.5-inches and weighed 4.9 pounds. We saw a fairly diverse mix of other species in the Merwins. Rainbows made up most of the catch, especially late-April into May. We pulled the traps before the suckers started their spawning run, but we did see a large number of suckers the last couple of days we ran the traps. Other captured species included perch, ling, carp, stonecats, one brook trout, and one northern pike. The northern was caught off pond 1 on May 7 and was 27.7-inches and weighed 3.15 pounds. I've also got a couple of new Shad Raps that were tangled up in anchor lines. Obviously with the low catch rates, we did not meet all the objectives we hoped to achieve coming into this spring. One of the primary objectives of this effort was to mark enough fish to get a lake-wide population estimate for walleye. We didn't mark nearly enough fish to meet this goal. Even with the low numbers, we should still be able to use the reward tags for harvest information. Factoring in the tagged fish that were not captured last year, and accounting for natural mortality, and adding in the fish that were tagged this spring, I figure there are around 70 walleyes with reward tags still at large in the population. I think that may be enough tags still in the population to follow up on exploitation estimates obtained from 2007 reward tagging. Even though our spawn sampling was pretty dismal, I'm not convinced that the overall spawn was a bust. Looking at water temperature data, there were a few days where water temps were entering the optimal range, but we didn't get our gear back in the water soon enough. After all our gear was blown off on April 15, there were four days of relative calm and water temps were well within the spawning range. We weren't up and fishing again until April 17. I suspect that there were a couple of nights in that window where there was a lot of spawning going on while we were still trying to get our gear all put back together. There was a similar window about a week after the winter storm had hit, and another windy storm blew our gear in. Keep in mind that walleyes are a very fecund species (they produce eggs by the hundreds of thousands) and just a couple of days of good spawning conditions can produce thousands of offspring. I also want to thank the volunteers who came out to lend a hand, and I want to apologize to the people who volunteered for days where we had to cancel. Copyright, 2008  BigSkyOutdoors.Net |