Fish bag limits and overfishing

My fishing partner put his fifth bluegill in the live well and we stowed the gear. I caught my fifth keeper just a few minutes before he did. We both kept five decent crappie before we started fishing for bluegill.

We were fishing a Northwoods lake with one of those 5/15 bag limits, meaning an angler can keep fifteen panfish but only five of any one species. I’m not the only one that recalls the 25 panfish per angler per day on all lakes. I’m old enough to remember when the bag limits were 50 panfish per day per angler. And I knew people who would keep 50 panfish anytime they could catch them. Seems like back then it was easier to catch more fish.

Ten decent size panfish are enough for a meal for us. Just enough – we need to have a lot of fries and rye bread to go with the fish, since Josh can eat a lot of fish.

When your favorite lake goes from a bag limit of 25 to 15 and then to a 5/15 bag limit, few people are happy. A few that pushed for the bag reduction are happy, but the rest of us aren’t. I noticed some things in lakes that I’ve watched things like this happen. I’ve noticed that the average size of the panfish declined for several years before that. I’ve noticed that the number of fish caught declined too. On some lakes panfish anglers blamed musky stocking for the changes and reduced bag limits on their favorite lake.

I’ve lived long enough to see the rise of a few lakes and the fall of many more. I’m not talking about water levels. I’m talking about the quality of the fishing or the quality of the water.

I don’t hear anglers blaming musky as much as I did 15 years ago. There probably are a few lakes that an increase in musky density negatively impacted the number of panfish. But for the majority of the lakes, musky aren’t the cause. Lakes that 25 years ago held beautiful water all summer long have been blooming green for almost 20 years now and the panfish fishing declined. That doesn’t have anything to do with musky. Fishing pressure has a lot to do with this. And more efficient pressure than when there were 50 a day panfish bag limits. A number of years ago most of my time to fish came midweek and I can tell you that in the summer the fishing is better midweek. In the summer, lakes don’t see a lot of pressure midweek. Some days there might be less than 10 boats on the water during the week. Show up on the weekend and the parking lot for the launch is full with rigs parked along the road a city block away.

Fishing pressure has come year round for many years now. I see more people ice fishing on certain lakes during week the than I do boats on a busy summer weekend. The electronics used today makes catching fish through the ice easier and more productive. And yes, fish usually feed more aggressively in the summer so you usually catch more per person in the summer.

I had a couple of friends from out of the area that one weekend headed up to a lake that a lot of us around here fish. They were shocked by the number of vehicles on the ice. They stopped counting when they hit 500 with a major portion of the lake to go. They figured a thousand vehicles were on the ice with two people on average per vehicle.

They only kept fish over seven inches long and each took home five on both days. Another couple of friends were out there those same days and between the two of them they kept 15 one day and 21 the next.

If we figure 2,000 people fished that lake each day with an average of five fish per angler, that’s 10,000 panfish per day that weekend. Nothing scientific here, just a little common sense reasoning.

How many panfish can that lake produce? If things keep going the way they have, are we going to see catch and release fishing or size limits for panfish on some lakes? Or will the pressure move and the lakes recover?

I don’t have answers. The only thing I know for sure is that I haven’t seen the last bag limit reduction in my life.

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