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December 26, 2003

Red Lake walleye opener on track for 2006

Honer and Legatt Win Ice Team Championship

Crappie bite on Red Lake shows no signs of fading

New regs proposed for southeast trout streams

Brainerd area deer harvest sets record

Red Lake walleye opener on track for 2006
Red Lake fisheries technical committee announces 2006 walleye fishing opener for Red Lakes

DNR Reports
Fisheries managers from the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) recently concluded that the Red Lake walleye fishery is on track to be opened for harvest in 2006. Lakewide assessment data continues to indicate very promising progress towards walleye recovery.

“We are very encouraged by the progress that has been made in the past five years” said Dave Conner, Red Lake DNR administrative officer. “Barring unforeseen changes in current population trends, we fully expect that walleye harvest will resume in 2006”.

Walleye abundance has increased dramatically from the mid-1990’s when the walleye population crashed. Walleye fry stocked in 1999, 2001 and 2003 as part of the recovery plan have established a large population of young fish. Over the next several years, these fish are expected to mature and begin contributing to natural reproduction.

The Red Lake fisheries technical committee is composed of representatives of the Red Lake Band’s Department of Natural Resources; the Band’s Fisheries Association; Minnesota DNR’s Section of Fisheries; the Bureau of Indian Affairs; the United States Fish and Wildlife Service; and the University of Minnesota, Department of Fisheries and Wildlife.

The Committee will now focus their efforts on developing a protocol for setting safe harvest levels and devising a suite of harvest management options that could be implemented when the lake is re-opened to walleye fishing. “The next phase of the walleye restoration project will be critical to the ultimate success of the recovery plan,” said Henry Drewes, DNR regional fisheries manager. “The Band and the DNR will be working very closely with our constituents to determine harvest management strategies that are both sustainable and acceptable”.

Members of the Red Lakes Technical Committee are fully committed to continue working together to manage this fishery when harvest resumes with mutually agreed upon safe harvest levels, seasons, and limits that will be implemented with the help of law enforcement officials.

During the winter, while people are ice fishing, they will likely catch some walleyes. It is important that these fish are released to give them an opportunity to spawn over the next few years so that the population can continue to recover at its present pace.

Walleyes that are over 20 inches in size are probably the original Red Lake walleyes, which need to be protected in order to preserve their genetics into the future. With continued support and compliance of the walleye moratorium for the next few years, the walleye population will recover and the Red Lake walleye will be available for generations to come.

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Honer and Legatt Win Ice Team Championship
Local anglers Joe Honer and Ray Legatt took top honors at Ice Team’s championship, along with $10,000 & matching gold rings.

photos courtesy Mark Strand and Dave Genz

By Mark Strand
Contributing Writer
ALEXANDRIA, Minn. – A pair of central Minnesota anglers claimed the $10,000 check and matching gold rings by winning the second North American Ice Fishing Championship Dec. 21 on Lake Ida near Alexandria, Minnesota.

Dave Genz presents Joe Honer, St. Cloud, and Ray Legatt, Rice, winners of the North American Ice Fishing Championship, with a check for $10,000.

Joe Honer, St. Cloud, and Ray Legatt, Rice, won because they were able to locate a spot holding good-sized crappies to go with the lake’s abundant sunfish. Each team could weigh in seven sunfish and seven crappies at the conclusion of the event, which ran from 8 a.m.-2 p.m. on “Little Ida” a bay on the northwest corner of the lake, out from Betsy Ross Resort, which served as tournament headquarters.

Joe Honer (left) and Ray Legatt with the good-sized crappies that helped them take first place.

The ‘Championship’ field was made up of 50 two-person teams that qualified by finishing in the top 10 at last winter’s Trap Attack Opens, put on by Ice Team. “These people are the best ice fishermen in North America,” said Dennis Clark, Ice Team Director. “They’ve proven it in competition, and you can see it just by watching them in action.”

In spite of the talent level, most contestants struggled to find and catch any numbers of crappies. Honer and Legatt found a gradual slope along the shoreline break just east of Betsy Ross Resort, and knew the area held catchable numbers of both crappies and sunfish in the coontail weeds in 7-9 feet of water.

“We caught ’em there in practice,” said Honer, “and then we left the area alone right before the tournament. Fortunately, the wind blew snow over our old holes and nobody found them.”

The pair fished virtually alone during tournament hours, putting an event limit of nice crappies in their water-filled bucket right away. (In the clear waters of Ida, the best ‘bite’ for mature crappies typically comes at dawn, dusk, and even after dark, so the contestants were further challenged to trigger bites from any crappies they did find at midday.) After that, they culled through numerous sunfish and several bonus crappies as weigh-in time neared.

Legatt explained that they used a mid-sized ice jig (#6 hook), tipping it with two ‘spikes’ (maggots) and one wax worm. “We always used both,” he said. “What we found in practice was that they’d always bite a wax worm, but the fluttering of the spikes seemed to do the best job of bringing the fish in.”

The jigs allowed for a ‘horizontal’ presentation, considered by top ice anglers to be a key. The winners were sight fishing, meaning they would sit inside their darkened portable shelters and watch the fish in the clear water. They’d drop quickly through the first two or three feet, then begin ‘pounding’ the jig (a technique made popular by Ice Team Captain Dave Genz, where you create a steady, strong, rapid set of vibrations at the bait with short movements of the wrist), lowering it into the depth where most of the fish came from.

“When we first started,” said Honer, “it was dark enough that you couldn’t see the fish, so we were using glow jigs and just watching for the glowing head to disappear. That’s how we got most of our crappies.”

Honer and Legatt’s bucket of 14 fish weighed 6.58 pounds.

Runners-up Dale Erath and Mark Bauer, from Illinois, fished both deep and shallow for their tournament limit of crappies and sunfish.

“We found most of our crappies right along a ledge that went from 17 to about 20 feet,” said Erath. “We stayed right on the shady side of that ledge, and just moved up and down it until we found fish.”

After the early crappie bite slowed, they moved into 7-9 feet of water on an expansive weed flat just west of the Betsy Ross Resort. There, they put together an impressive catch of sunfish and enough kicker crappies to have seven of each come weigh time.

Erath and Bauer’s catch totaled 6.28 pounds.

This team relies exclusively on miniature plastic tails rather than live bait, especially in clear water. Even in the deeper water during the low-light conditions of early morning, they used Techni-Glo tails (made by Lindy) to entice crappies and sunfish.

They thread the finesse plastics onto the end of an ice jig, positioning the plastic at a 90-degree angle to the hook. They then swim the offering, letting the tail twitch.

From left: Third place Team, Fred Welter, Illinois, and John Corl, Indiana; event emcee Dave Genz; and second place team, Mark Bauer and Dale Erath, both of Illinois.

“It does a lot with minimal jigging,” explained Bauer. “You have to get that plastic on there straight. If those tails weren’t on there right, the fish would look at it but wouldn’t hit it.

Sometimes, you could bring it up, fix it, put it back down, and the same fish would take it.”

Another key, in their minds, was to move often from hole to hole. “You have to keep moving,” says Erath. “Once you catch some fish in one hole, if you stop seeing them or catching them, you need to move on. We even moved big moves, from one area to another.”

Indiana angler John Corl and Illinois angler Fred Welter were the only other team to catch seven crappies. They finished third, with a total weight of 5.74 pounds.

Note: A total of nine states were represented at the Ice Team Championship. Rules meetings and other gatherings were held at the Holiday Inn in Alexandria. A large media contingent was present, including television stations, North American Fisherman television, Midwest Outdoors television, and most major magazines that cover ice fishing.

The Trap Attack Open trail will make six stops this winter, beginning Jan 11 in Brooklyn, MI and Devils Lake, ND. For information on competing, contact Ice Team at www.iceteam.com or 763-231-4129.

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Crappie bite on Red Lake shows no signs of fading
Focusing on big silver slabs

By Doug Smith
Star Tribune
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) – The “slab” crappies are still there – plentiful, hungry and bigger than ever in Red Lake in northern Minnesota.

Anglers this week are fishing through about a foot of ice for crappies averaging 12 to 14 inches and weighing 1-1/2 pounds or more.

Red Lake is one of the most remarkable fisheries the state has ever seen.

“Anglers are out there, and they’re getting some fish,” said Kelly Petrowske, a local fishing guide who also rents ice fishing houses on the lake.

Early-season action has been inconsistent so far, which is typical. February and March tend to be the best crappie months, and 5,000 to 10,000 anglers can descend on the lake when the bite is hot.

“I have yet to see a limit, but I saw one crappie caught the other night that was about 18 inches long,” said Tim Gray, a Department of Natural Resources conservation officer.

Anglers are expected to come from all over – possibly up to 10,000 of them in March – to fish for the crappies in Red Lake.

It’s the allure of huge crappies – and the chance to catch lots of them – that for the past five years has attracted anglers from throughout the Midwest and beyond to Red Lake.

And the crappie boom is showing no signs of fading. At least not yet.

Red Lake’s phenomenal crappie fishery is the result of the unlikely convergence of several key events. Once a premier walleye lake, Red Lake was decimated by commercial netting and overfishing. By the early 1990s, walleyes were nearly wiped out.

Then in 1995, crappies – aided by a mild spring – had a remarkably successful spawning season. The crappie population exploded in the void left by the walleyes. That 1995 “year class” – now 9 years old – comprises 90 percent of the crappies being caught by anglers, said Gary Barnard, DNR area fisheries manager in Bemidji.

Based on annual DNR netting surveys, crappie reproduction since then has been marginal; there are few small crappies in the lake to replace the Class of ‘95. That means the crappie bonanza is likely to fade as those fish disappear.

How long will that be?

No one is sure.

“We’ve sampled crappies as old as 14, but they probably are the exception,” Barnard said.

Most won’t live that long. Natural mortality increases as fish age, and some crappie mortality is likely to be occurring now after nine years, he said. Angler harvest apparently is only minimally affecting the population. That’s because anglers are fishing only the 20 percent of the 289,000-acre lake that is state-owned. The rest is owned by the Red Lake Band of Chippewa and is off-limits to non-band anglers.

Said Barnard: “Mortality is going to start kicking in on the bulk of the population. The crappie fishing will tail off, but there’s going to be some decent fishing for awhile. It’s not just going to end overnight.”

Already, though, the lake is dramatically changing.

In an effort to jump-start the walleye fishery, walleye fishing was closed to band and non-band anglers, and walleye fry was stocked beginning in 1999. Those walleyes have thrived and now are 16 to 20 inches long. Some anglers are catching three walleyes for every crappie they get. All of the walleyes must be released because a walleye harvest moratorium was imposed to help the lake recover.

Those 1999 fish are expected to spawn for the first time next spring. If the recovery continues, state and tribal officials eventually will have to decide whether to reopen the walleye fishery. If anglers and local businesses are lucky, that will happen by the time the big crappie fishery fades.

But for now, the focus is on crappies – big silver slabs. The flow of anglers to Red Lake this season is just beginning.

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New regs proposed for southeast trout streams

In an effort to improve trout fishing opportunities, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has proposed a package of fishing regulations for 26 streams in six southeast counties.

Under the proposal, 14 streams would be subject to a protected slot for all trout from 12-16 inches, seven streams would be catch-and-release for all trout, and two streams would have a 12-inch maximum size limit for brook trout. An additional three streams that support trout, but aren’t officially designated trout streams, would carry a catch-and-release regulation for all trout. With the exception of those three undesignated streams, where bait would be allowed, all the streams coming under the newly proposed regulations would be restricted to artificial lures and flies.

The proposal would increase the miles of southeast Minnesota trout streams with special regulations from the existing 53.3 to 137.2, out of a total of 680. It would also add another 44.3 miles of special trout regulations on undesignated streams.

The proposed regulations are the outcome of a two-year process of gathering public input from a wide variety of trout anglers. During five meetings in the spring of 2003 and a roundtable in August 2003, anglers expressed support for the type of tiered regulation approach embodied in the new proposal.

“These regulations balance the expectations of anglers who want to catch larger trout with those who are happy bringing home a few fish for the frying pan,” said DNR fisheries section chief Ron Payer. “With this proposal, there should be ample opportunity for all anglers to enjoy the type of experience they’re hoping for.”

The proposed regulations will be open to comment, with public input meetings planned for fall 2004 in Goodhue, Wabasha, Winona, Olmsted, Houston and Fillmore Counties. An additional public input meeting will be held in the Twin Cities. Signs detailing the proposed regulations will be posted along affected streams in early April 2004. If approved, the new regulations would be effective starting with the 2005 fishing season.

“Across the upper midwest, southeastern Minnesota is increasingly recognized as a destination for trout fishing,” said Jason Moeckel, DNR assistant regional fisheries manager in Rochester. “This proposal will give us an opportunity to evaluate how well angling regulations work in combination with other management tools to continue our progress toward a world-class coldwater fishery.”

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Brainerd area deer harvest sets record

A count of deer registered for the 2003 firearms deer season and archery/muzzleloader seasons to date indicates that hunters in the MNDNR Brainerd Wildlife work area (Crow Wing and lower Cass counties) set another deer harvest record of 19,121 deer.

This harvest is up 25.7 percent over last year’s previous record of 15,211 and also represents a string of four of the top five harvests records set in recent years (see following table).

“In light of increasing deer populations, it was the DNR’s goal this year to reduce deer populations in most permit areas through an increase in antlerless harvests” said Gary Drotts, MNDNR Brainerd Area Wildlife Supervisor. “Hunters responded well to the new antlerless permit process for managed and intensive permit areas and we wish to thank them for the overall harvest (19,121) record and buck to antlerless ratio (34.9 percent to 65 percent) we set.”

The MN DNR Brainerd Area Wildlife Office would also like to thank the 37 private businesses that serve as big game registration stations during the bear and deer seasons.

“They provide the critical registration point for bear and deer hunters to document their harvest” Drotts added. “Please give them a thanks for a job well done.”

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