ut_falcon

Read through the 50 pages and counting on the michigan sportsman forum and they are pissed off with the lake trout agenda thats being pushed. Hope it's not too late for them to save their salmon fishery. It's a real wake up call for what is happening on lake ontario and we need to put the pressure on before it's too late. We keep hearing that cutting lake trout is a long term discussion but that discussion needs to start now.

Nice coho and rainbow

Interesting, in the early days of the salmon program you see similar yoy alewife numbers in 1978 & 1979, these were two of the coldest winters on record. Shows the cyclical nature of the lake.

Was a 29 pound football king caught a few days ago so there's gotta be some food in the lake.

20-40% of the phosphorus comes from lake erie, the rest from rivers and non-point sources like farm run-off.

Ontario just made 8 separate 12hr round trips with the stocking truck to deliver 160000 lakers to lake ontario, our money well spent for sure. 150000-200000 delivered each year for the last 3 years from the hatchery in northern ontario.

Lots of walleye in the lake the last two year classes were near record due to the cold winters that supressed the alewifes. These things are cyclical,don't forget the last two winters were the coldest since Pacific's were introduced to the lake.

The top 10 fish in the gosd derby on the north shore are all over 30 pounds this week so things are starting to look up. There were a couple reports of 38 pound fish caught and realeased by people not in the derby. We will see in a few weeks when the matures are all starting to show up at the river mouths.

You said: "Kings are now needed, but if there were no invasive species from the ballasts of ships, the zebra or quagga mussels, alewives, etc. I would have loved to see this lake with millions of Atlantics and lakers. Unfortunately it will never happen again and it wasn't from a lack of trying, but years and years and years of the demise of the entire eco-system."

My biggest problem with your philosophy and that of many of the biologist in charge of lake is that you believe the lake's ecosystem is damaged and needs to be restored to some arbitrary period in history. Yes at one point the lake was filled with Atlantic salmon and Lake Trout, and then humans came and introduced a bunch of new species that changed the entire ecosystem. Humans then changed that ecosystem again with the introduction of the Pacific Salmon, in my opinion that change was for the better. Many of us enjoy catching the Pacific’s but now there is a growing opinion in the scientific community that we need to undo this "damage" and restore the lake back to a point before Europeans colonized North America. Atlantics were extirpated from the lake for a reason, the ecosystem changed and they disappeared from the lake. Those changes allowed the Pacific Salmon to thrive and are preventing the Atlantics from returning to the lake in any numbers, that is the reality of the lake. Let’s stop wasting time and money and instead put that towards what will actually work and improve the fishery that can and does actually work in the lake as it currently exists.

Think again when you claim no hatchery space was reallocated for the Atlantic's. The entire Canadian brown trout program for lake ontario was moved to a hatchery ill suited for brown trout production. The new hatchery has colder water resulting in yearling browns that are half the weight. the previous hatchery is now being used for the Atlantic's. The new location is also 3 hours further from the lake making transportation if the browns that much harder.

Wow DNRoch spoken like a true biologist. Just blows my mind that guys like you can be put in charge of the lake and the future of our fisheries and the economy tied to them.

40.15 pound fish won the GOSD last year, not too many 40's around though.

Just wanted to say that I'm not a charter captain or biologist and I don't have any hidden agendas in this, just a fisherman who cares about what happens to the future of our fisheries. I didn't belive what Darryl was saying about the Atlantics until I started reading the MNR documents for myself and started to see what was really going on and direction that our fisheries in Ontario are headed. Canadadude, you make a good point that we have an amazing fishery now so why do things that could screw that up? The Credit could have a much better fishery if the migratory fish were allowed access to the better spawning grounds as the Atlantics have now. Steelhead are better suited to the lakes environment, how hard is that to understand? Atlantics don't survive as well and I don't think they ever can, they may be able to increase the numbers but it will never rival what we have now with the browns and steelhead. One more thing to add, is that the MNR has been getting out of the salmon/trout game for a long time now, the fishing clubs on Huron and Georgian bay now support that fishery. The MNR are now just stocking lakers to support the aboriginal commercial fishery on georgian bay.

I brought up those number to show that the ontario government benifits from the recreational fishery at least as much as the ny government yet puts less back into the fishery. That 2.3 billion and 600 million is taxed at 13 percent not to mention the gas tax for the boat and to get to the water. The 70 million in licence fees is all supposed to go back into the recreational fishery yet its very difficult to see exactly where that money is being spent. I don't think its unreasonable to want to know or care about where my money is being spent. It would be nice to have a say in where the money is going instead we have those decisions being made for us.

When did I ever say there were no learnings from the Huron and Michigan issues? I said that when the chinooks ran out of food on huron they did not "Adapt" to other food sources very well and most died. How do you personally know that the chinook in lake ontario will adapt to this new food source and how can you say it's not a risk to the alewife population that is currently sustaining the healthy chinook population in the lake??? Point is you don't know, no one does, only thing we know is the lake is currently healthy.