Sarley: The states are doing good work stocking waterways with fish

Northern Illinois seems to have had the beginning of a very successful spring trout season.

The stocked lakes seemed very well fished by the locals and many delicious fish dinners were provided by the IDNR stocking program. Catch-and-release isn’t really practiced by spring trout fishermen, and that is OK because the trout are stocked for the purpose of being eaten.

Aside from the trout, I can’t blame anyone for keeping some fish for the dinner table if they have a legal license to do so and the fish meet the criteria for size and number limits. The angler is within his legal rights to do that.

Does keeping fish hurt the waterway when the fisherman keeps fish? Good question. Some fisheries are managed by a state’s department of natural resources knowing that a certain amount of fish are going to be kept.

At Ohio’s Lake Erie the authorities know that almost everyone keeps a limit of delicious walleyes. It is amazing to see the boats coming off the water at the end of the day carrying thousands of golden walleyes that are probably bigger than any you have seen anywhere else. I’ve come off Erie holding a three-man limit of walleyes and not a single one weighed less that 6 pounds. That is incredible.

Ohio authorities have a good idea about the number of walleyes that will be taken every year. They balance that off by implementing a very generous stocking program. They maintain the population by setting strong limits on numbers and sizes that change from year to year. Ohio does a masterful job of keeping the walleye numbers up on Lake Erie. I have a hard time believing how they do it.

Muskies are called “the fish of 10,000 casts,” because they are so notoriously hard to catch. Most musky fishermen always release any muskies they catch. The exception would be if someone caught a true “fish of a lifetime” and wanted to have it mounted to hang on the wall of their trophy room. I don’t know of anybody from these parts that has ever tasted a musky. Catching and eating one is pure sacrilege in the upper Midwest.

That said, the state of Missouri is a hot bed of musky fishing. Missouri produces a lot of muskies, and incredibly, a lot of them get eaten every year. The Missouri DNR realizes that a decent percentage of the state’s muskies end up on the dinner table. They stock the state’s lakes and rivers to reflect that. The policies on stocking fish differ from state to state and type of fish. Sometimes the public’s taste for eating fish has a lot to do with the number.

People ask me if I ever keep the fish I catch for consumption. I will be honest. I used to have no compunction about catching a limit of golden lake perch from out on Lake Michigan. They gave their lives for a good cause, in my opinion.

I mentioned Lake Erie, previously. I would love to go there again. Captain Bob Needles put us on the walleyes and he shared a phenomenal recipe for cooking them up. I’d be cooking them on a Friday night only to hear my wife complaining, “Oh no, not walleyes again.” I could never get tired of walleyes.

I would have no problem with eating bluegills that I catch from Lake Geneva. They are huge and they are abundant.

I’ll admit to eating smallmouth bass, one time at a shore lunch in northwest Ontario. I am not proud to admit this, ashamed actually. We had not been able to catch a walleye or northern to go along with our campfire beans and potatoes. In retrospect, I should have gone vegan instead of killing a couple of smallies to feed my fat gut. I’ll never eat smallmouth bass again, though I have to admit that they were totally scrumptious.