GAMBLER

Congrats Troutman10!

Congrats everyone. Just catching up after 5 days in the woods. Just one doe in five days.

Awesome Bill! Congrats!

You know you have raised your kid right when he sends you a photo of a cloud from the bus stop and says it looks like a pike!

It could be wired wrong and the switch for the bilge on the dash needs to be on for the float switch to work. I have seen all sorts of goofy things in boats over the years. People have no clue what they are doing.

Congrat Manny!

Those are really vintage! The wing shape is the original wing shape. It is slightly different now.

This is a perfect example of why we need Cormorant control.

I totally understand that lampricide doesn't kill adults. The treatments were not completed due to covid a couple years ago. The adult population is now high from those year classes. Its down right ugly the amount of adult Lamprey in Lake O right now. I'm worried it will cause mortality in Browns and Lakers. It seems to affect them the most from what I have seen over the years. If we go back to the original topic on stocking, Lower stocking numbers and mortality rates that are higher due to lamprey predation, its going to be an ugly road ahead. At the state of the lake meeting years ago, I believe it was Vince that said "we need to take better care of the fish we stock". That is 100% spot on. The DEC has worked with us to get the fish all in pens and helping survival. Now we need them to step up and 1) control the adult and future lamprey populations and 2) open a season on cormorants in NY! Canada has opened a season and you can take 50 birds a day. I will gladly buy steel shot, a duck stamp, get my HIP certification and spend days on the water ridding the world of a nasty bird that is destroying fish populations and habitat along the shoreline.

Get em Billy!

We are seeing a huge increase in population because lampricide treatments were not done due to covid. There is more that can be done than lampricide treatments to help this situation. There are attractants and repellants that can be used. They could use attractants in certain less fertile tribs along with lamprey traps to catch adults. They can also use repellents to keep lamprey out of the most fertile tribs. Using just lampricide with the current adult population isn't enough. This multi million dollar a year fishery should get more effort to keep it as good as it can be. The DEC does a great job but we could ALWAYS do better. Lamprey predation on our fish populations is not going to help keep the fishery top notch. Look at what the lamprey did to some of the fingerlakes in the past.

He retired last I knew.

Treatments will not kill adults. The issue right now is the adult population. We averaged 2-3 lampreys a trip! I had lampreys sucked to rigger balls, my probe and the hull of my boat. I have never seen that in the 38 seasons I have been fishing Lake Ontario! We need to push the DEC to do more than just treatments. There is new technology in attractants and repellants that could be used along with traps. Attract lampreys to tributaries that are easy to deploy lamprey traps and trap as many adults as possible. Put repellant in tribs with high spawning success rate to keep them out of prime habitat (as long as they don’t cause harm to other species). The DEC had Covid money from the government that had to be used on Covid related issues with the fishery, here is an issue that was magnified by Covid. Why not spend the money to correct this issue. Sitting back and doing nothing only hurts the fishery. If you think fish populations are an issue now, hang on because it could get worse due to mortality from lamprey. If man power is an issue, I’m sure tons of guys (both trib and lake) would volunteer to assist in the program. I certainly would.

My huge issue with the fishery right now that every angler Trib or lake angler should be concerned with is the lamprey population. This is going to do NOTHING to help fish numbers. What do we do to help correct this issue? You can lampricide all you want but that does nothing for the adults already wreaking havoc on out fish populations.

I dealt with Dr. Haynes for years doing the pen rearing. Good guy. His replacement was a great guy too. He gave Rob and I a tour of the Brockport fisheries facility. It was cool to see the fish they kept in captivity for research. They were a great asset for our pen project. Lots of volunteers and they got the DEC valuable information from our project.

Interesting. The professor from Brockport never mentioned that in the conversations we had on natural reproduction when they came out to volunteered with our pen project.

Salmon Creek in Hilton has kings. They haven't been stocked in 20+ years there and the salmon can't get over the falls on Parma Center Rd 99% of the falls due to no water. Strays. I would love to believe they both had natural reproduction but both tribs are not the greatest habit for natural reproduction. If you said Irondequoit Creek, I would be with you. If there was natural reproduction, where are all the fry? I have brown / steelhead many years on Sandy in the spring and I have never seen any clouds of fry like the Salmon River. If there are fry, they would never make the smallmouth and rockbass gauntlet in the spring in Sandy. You show me fry, I will change my opinion.

Here is a graph from the 2019 state of the lake meeting. If you look back in the 2000’s and froward, you will see the jump in 2 year olds as the majority that are spawning compared three year olds that are the majority.

I highly doubt Sandy has good natural reproduction. The fish in Sandy are more than likely strays from other stocking sites. Back in the day 3 times the fish were stocked BUT, we didn't have as much natural reproduction and we have better stocking practices than we did in the 80's. Pen rearing has increased survival big time. Pen reared compared to direct stocked fish the survival rate is 3 to1 from what I can remember from the meetings. Seeing that salmon are spawning at 2 and 3 compared to 3 and 4 like the old days, fish size is going to be down.

Size could be down for a bunch of reasons. We had stocking cuts and the bait biomass was lower than it should have been. This year class of kings had to exert more energy its entire life to eat. Last year the biomass rebounded with a giant year class from the years prior hatch. The kings ate well but they were exerting more energy to fill their stomachs (eating smaller alewife). Lets see what happens in the next two seasons to the size. If the year classes of kings that started life with the higher biomass levels have more food available, the size should rebound some. As for the comment about the fishery being run on fishermen's opinion, isn't that what they did with the steelhead regulations?

Atlantics have been a failure on Lake Ontario for decades. We have been over this more than the striper topic here, IF they survived well, they might actually get bigger and bigger.

I just don't understand why people cheat in tournaments. Your reputation is one thing you can ruin and NEVER get back again! Is it worth it? Hell no. I really enjoy derby and tournament fishing. To cheat and ruin something I enjoy doing would be stupid.

The Striper topic has been beat to death more than the Caledonia Hatchery topic. Let it go. If you want stripers, go fish them somewhere else.