just general concern

[fishguru73]

The truth is with a fertile lake like UL, the crappie and gills are going to get out of hand if the water stays up and they aren't routinely harvested. Then you will catch nothing but runts. Mature female crappie can produce as many as 250,000 eggs in a single spawn. Take that times a one percent survival rate and you get 2500 new fish per female. Mature white bass can deposit over a half-million eggs and bluegill produce about a third as many as crappie. Gills stick to cover and hide around rocks which gives the population a foothold despite predation. Perch are slower to sustain a population because they deposit egg strands of around 20,000 on submerged vegetation and the gills have caviar with their crackers. I don't believe, with the incredible amount of forage in that lake, that it is necessary to release perch, but I think it is a good practice until they are more well established. After all, this is high desert and droughts aren't uncommon. That makes the perch population particularly susceptible to spawning habitat loss. White bass roam open water most of the year and can be hard to pinpoint at times. That lake is so overrun with them that it is hard to catch any over 10 inches most of the year, so I show people how to bust the snot out of them whenever I get on to a good location. When panfish are found in wintering areas and during the spawn they can be very easy to catch, but there aren't many people that know where to find them with consistency throughout the year. Choosing the right baits, lures, and presentations also eludes most. That's why I give detailed posts on how to catch them. Surprisingly few people have applied what I have passed along and I am clawing at the keyboard when I read posts that say things like" We used worms 4-6 feet and caught a few but it was pretty slow." Aaaaargh! I caught almost 200 today and kept a limit of crappie... and, i'm not picking dried worm entrails from under my fingernails. Dinner was oh soooo delicious. Anyway, like I was saying... Walleye are abundant there too but they have so much to eat that trying to get one to take a lure is like dangling a carrot in front of me at a Chinese buffet. The largemouth are really getting esablished and I have seen more this year then I can recall previously. My big gripe about bucket mouths is everyone else's. There are way too many people keeping LMB over the size limit. Seriously folks, I encourage all of you to pass the word that largemouth taste like garbage compared to my beloved crappie and that is one more reason to let them go. That and none of us would mind having some tournament quality pig fishing close to home.[]
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