slot size vote

(This is a re-post of info from the TFF Property Owners Association web page regarding a potential size limit change for Walleyes on the TFF. This potential change will be voted on at the Wisconsin Conservation Congress spring hearings to be held on Monday 4/8.)

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New Proposed Walleye Regulation for the TFF will be addressed at DNR Spring Hearings on April 8

The DNR Spring hearings will be held in all 72 counties at 7:00 PM on Monday, April 8. Detailed information is available here – 2019 DNR Spring Hearings. The Iron County meeting will be held at the Iron County Memorial Building, 201 Iron St., Hurley, WI 54534.

A fisheries management question extremely important to the TFF is on the agenda.

Question 17 asks: Do you favor applying a 12-inch minimum length limit, but only one fish greater than 15 inches, and a daily bag limit of 3 walleyes on the Turtle- Flambeau Flowage, Trude Lake, Flambeau River upstream of Turtle- Flambeau Flowage (at Murray’s Landing), Little Turtle River, and the Manitowish River upstream of Flambeau River to the Rest Lake Dam (including Benson Lake, Sturgeon Lake, and Vance Lake)? This is the new proposed regulation developed by our fish manager Zach Lawson, and has received unanimous support by our fish management committee. We urge everyone to support this new regulation.

If you can not attend in person, for the first time, you can provide your input to the spring hearings online. The online input option will be provided through the link below which will go live on Monday 4/8/2019 @ 7:00 pm.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/2019WISpringHearingInput


The online version will remain open for three days (72 hours

I intend on supporting this. From my limited experience the slot limit seems to work in other areas of the country and Canada that I have fished.

My main question is will this be effective if spearing of the spawning females 15" and above is allowed at past levels on TFF? Or are sport anglers efforts significantly softened when spearing of spawning fish is still allowed?

The minimum needs to be higher. Get it up around 16". Most people cheat the ruler if you ask for 12 some will take short ones. Go with 16 and let the little ones grow up. Just my 2 cents but bigger is better. One over 18 with a 2 per day limit.

Thanks for info Brew. I support this and don’t think it will change how I fish here. Those 14” fish taste great!

If there was a 16” minimum here I would rarely catch a keeper and go fish somewhere else. The guides would have to find more perch,gills and crappie otherwise they they would go broke...

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Originally Posted by Greenkeeper

Thanks for info Brew. I support this and don’t think it will change how I fish here. Those 14” fish taste great!

If there was a 16” minimum here I would rarely catch a keeper and go fish somewhere else. The guides would have to find more perch,gills and crappie otherwise they they would go broke...

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They can only get to 16 if you let the 14's grow then you"ll have a lot more 16's. I've said it before when I first started going up there they had a 16" size limit. It was hard to find many that small. Most were 18s or bigger. Suffer a few years to enjoy a bigger sized fish. Lakes I've fish at home had 18" to 20" slot size to get the fishery size up worked great. When the population of fish was of nice size they adjusted the size limits again. This was done on smallies as well as eyes. And on the smallies it was 1 limit fish for many years to build the population. Nice to know when you catch a fish it's not going to be pocket sized but photo worthy.

Like I said just my 2 cents. If catching 12 to 14 inch eyes is your thing that's the place to do it. I'm catch and release anyway so makes no difference to me.

gdi

Male fish don’t grow much past 14” at the tff. This proposal is based on science that supports that idea. The tff will be a better fishery long term if we all let the bigger fish go.