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Hey guys! I did a podcast with Rob from Lake Michigan Angler and Michael from Chi-City Yaker (Youtube). We talked about the fishery on our end of the lake. I did name drop the Hoosier Coho Club, the Great Lakes Salmon Initiative and also this website as well. It's pretty long but it's entertaining and full of information. If I misspoke on anything related to our end of the lake, please forgive me and drop a comment in the comment section. Thanks for checking it out. Bryan

Great podcast, love to hear that there are others still using Sutton's as sliders.

Nicely done Bryan, I thought you covered the southend pretty well. Good A-Z info. And thanks for the GLSI shout out. Left you a PM here.

Ed

PM sent back.

Great podcast, nice job and good discussion all around. Really enjoyed it! Shout out for everybody talking about barotrauma and keeping perch when fishing deep

Since you asked for a fact check....  

You are correct on the brown trout, they are surplus from Illinois. We don't really have capacity to raise any more fish and brown trout return is low, so we don't want to cut better-producing fish like coho or steelhead to raise browns. We generally get 35,000 to 40,000 but some years get more and some years get less (or none in the case of last year)

Only real quibble is that Indiana never stopped stocking chinooks, they were just reduced from 200,000 to 60,000 fish and then later 75,000 rotated between Little Cal and Trail Creek every other year. But the survival was so low that it was essentially creating no fishery. IN fact that was what we had proposed, cutting them altogether because it was a waste of resources, but intense public pushback led to us retaining 1 pond of them to stock. 

Excellent points made on the deepwater perch being caught: I'm glad you mentioned this...

Maybe the topic of a next podcast show could be to discuss the perch fishery, and what a special opportunity we have that has developed in that 50ft+ water depth during these cold months.  I'd love to see a more in-depth discussion of fishing ethics and understanding that fish need to be kept at that depth and not thrown back.  I'm not as educated in the fishing regulations and laws regarding fish being thrown back that are going to die, but I liken it to waterfowl hunting and the wanton waste concept about not making an effort to retrieve your birds and make them part of your daily bag limit.  How it's legal (let alone ethical) for ignorant fishermen throwing back 11 to 13 inch perch from 50+ feet of water jut to greedily catch a 14 or 15 incher is beyond me.  I mean I get it in the summer and the shallows: do whatever you want as those fish survive catch and release just fine!  But there needs to be better education for fisherman in these deep waters and protecting the resource.  Sorry, just my 2 cents.

Regarding the legality, it technically is wanton waste to discard a mortally injured fish. Conservation officers wrote several tickets for anglers culling perch last winter/spring

The difficulty is proving that the fish floating belly up next to an angler's boat is the same one they released, particularly when there's a pack of 50 or 100 boats, and a perch might swim down before surfacing belly up a few minutes or hours later


Outside of education about barotrauma, the only real solution would be making it illegal to sort fish when fishing deeper than 40ish feet (hard to enforce), or close the season entirely during the winter/spring (easier to enforce but much more restrictive)

Great discussion. Not sure if it’s been mentioned, but perch can’t burp! Lot of BS gets passed around between fishermen on this one. If it hasn’t been covered, maybe Ben could explain the anatomy…

Here is a really good article about barotrauma, one of the best ones I have seen talking about multiple aspects  gf.nd.gov/magazine/2021/jul/understanding-barotrauma

The most relevant excerpt:

Some fish are more susceptible to barotrauma than others. Fish like trout, salmon and pike have a duct that connects their swim bladder to their stomach, allowing them to “burp” air to decompress their swim bladder as they are brought up from the depths. Meanwhile, fish like walleye, perch or bass do not have this duct and regulate their swim bladder by releasing gasses through the gills via the bloodstream (similar to how a human lung exchanges oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood). This is a much slower process, and results in the bloated appearance of the swim bladder when a fish is reeled in from deep water.In numerous studies across North America, largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, walleye and yellow perch have exhibited increased mortality due to the effects of angling barotrauma. The depths of those effects varied depending on the study lake or fish species, but in general most studies have shown a dramatic increase of mortality when depths exceed 10 meters or roughly 33 feet. Coincidentally, 10 meters generally corresponds to the depth where the pressure under water measures one atmosphere.

Hmm regarding angler "BS" as southshore put it... 


Regarding releasing fish by "fizzing", I think I may have written this on here (or maybe facebook) before, but essentially the premise is that you poke the swim bladder to vent the gas. The issue is that a lot of untrained people are poking the stomach, or other internal organs, and just causing more damage. Best case scenario, if you poke the air bladder with a needle, you are releasing that pressure so they can swim back down to depth and re-pressurize. That's all well and good,  but getting the fish back down to depth only corrects the swim bladder issue and blood gasses. It's pretty hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube, as it were, for hemmoraged organs, eye damage, etc. Not to mention that if you poked a big hole in the air bladder or stomach, it has a hole in its organ to boot, and may have issues regulating buoyancy and/or eating. And probably most importantly, just because the fish swam away and out of sight doesn't mean it was fine - it can die a few hours to days later. 

Other things I have heard - reel the fish up slow!  As someone who's done a fair amount of scuba diving, this one always makes me roll my eyes. These fish have been at that depth/pressure for a long time. Days or weeks, most likely! Your bottom time scuba diving at 50 to 60 feet without a decompression stop is in the ballpark of an hour. Longer than that and you have to add a decompression stop and hang out for say 15-30 minutes halfway up (i'm simplifying here, I haven't looked up the calculation on a dive table). To actually avoid barotrauma you would probably have to take about 30 minutes to reel a fish up.

My personal rule fishing for walleye, perch, crappie, bluegill, etc over 30 feet deep is I am keeping them, as long as they meet any legal length requirements. I just can't in good conscience release fish that have a significant chance of dying afterward.

Years ago we kept a hypodermic needle on board and poke it into the air ladder the relieve the pressure then pull it out and the fish would swim away.

We haven't been targeting lake trout and perch in recent years so I've forgotten about this until now. We were tought at a fishing seminar.

You use a very small diameter needle and when you pull it out everything seals up. Never had a problem once we started do this and it worked great on perch!