Fishing made easy using technology

I don’t have to ask what you’re doing this weekend with the opener of the Wisconsin Inland Gamefish and Trout season.

Fishing has changed so much in my lifetime. Just think about bag limits and size limits of fish. Maybe some of you can remember when the minimum size limit on musky was 32 inches once. Today many lakes and rivers have a 50 inch minimum. But there are also many lakes with a 40 inch size limit and more. How about walleye size limits, one almost needs a laptop and a satellite for wireless on their boat. Fortunately most lakes have that posted for walleyes at the launch.

Bag limits have changed drastically as well for panfi sh. I can remember when fisher people considered it radical when the bag limit was reduced to 25 panfish, in some places people talked like communist Russia invaded and took over. Today we have lakes that you can only catch five panfish of a single species. Other lakes you can keep 10 or 15 fish, other still 25, and I’m sure other combinations exist - a far cry from ancient times when the bag limit was 50 panfish per fisherman.

My suspicion is that we are not too many years away from minimum size limits on panfish. I suspect trying to create a size limit on panfish has crossed the minds of more than one fishing enthusiast or biologist type already.

This is a lot to ponder and it literally just scratches the surface. This does though mean that we all care deeply about the places we fish and the fish we catch.

One of the biggest driving forces in all of these changes has been the quality and prevalence of fishing electronics. They add a lot to the experience of fishing. They provide the fisher with a tremendous amount of information that used be hard won. When they first came on the scene they gave us water depth.

Today sonar systems can rotate 360 degrees scanning out a good distance from your location telling the fisherman not only where the fish are or moved to, but contour of the bottom, structure on or around the bottom, type of structure, what type of bottom surface, your exact location of all this on the lake, size of fish, temperature of the water, where the fish are in the water column, and oh yeah depth. Some electronics are even capable of piloting the boat along a predetermined course. Some can show a fisher’s bait moving through the water and fish responding to it. For guys that want to know the species of fish there are underwater camera systems for that too.

It all means more fish caught. I sincerely hope that this doesn’t mean catch and release only lakes for panfish someday. Then again when I was a kid most fishers that caught musky didn’t release the fish. Today I know several that trek to places far away every year to fish for musky, spend an entire week fishing, and don’t keep a single fish.

There are catch and release only walleye lakes in Minnesota and Canada.

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CHUCK K OLAR LOCAL OUTDOORSMAN