Scofield - Great place for anyone looking for bait

[TubeDude]

The positive side of that is that the chubs are mostly bigguns...not the swarms of small chubs we used to see there.  The predators are doing their jobs.  Chubs live up to 20 years...and the large ones will keep spawning each spring.  But as long as there are enough predators to eat up all the small ones each year the big ones will gradually die out and the lake will be relatively chub free.  That is what happened at both Starvation and Jordanelle.  And some of the big old "chubosaurs" really got gross before they finally died out.  Here are a couple from Starvation back in about 2007. 

I agree with your assessment about not catching any small ones but for the last three years large chubs were only a small portion of the catch.  

Something seemed to change, and someone noticed that the DWR did not stock as many wipers in 2020 so that may have contributed to the increase in chubs.

Hopefully your findings are only a temporary and/or seasonal or localized anomaly.  I suspect that the chubs are congregating for their annual spawning thing...rather than being present throughout the lake in such great numbers.  After spawning they will typically disperse throughout the lake and become more solitary...with only infrequent catches by anglers.   Those big chubs are probably at least 8-10 years old...not recently spawned fish.  And once they get beyond a certain size they become dinner for only the largest tiger muskies.  The wipers subsist mostly on chubs less than about 6 inches long. 

I'm wondering if there are any redside shiners left in Scofield.  On my last minnowing expedition there...about 3-4 years ago...I caught a few redsides in my cast net by throwing around some of the docks.  But that was before the wipers got a good fin-hold and they have likely slurped up most of the redsides along with the smaller chubs.