What do you think?

[BlueRanger]

First of all, walleyes were already being harvested in large numbers back in 1975, and the population was apparently sustaining that harvest level. Secondly, your dad is entirely correct when he says the smallmouth population at that time was almost nonexistent. During the 1975 survey, only 17 smallmouth were sampled from the entire flowage, compared to 250 in 1997. If those numbers seem small, I should note that the survey locations and timing are heavily biased toward sampling walleyes - during the time when the surveys occur, most of the smallmouth aren't in areas that lend themselves to electrofishing. Still, I think it's fair to assume that the 1975 smallmouth population was something less than 1/10 of the 1997 population.

To believe the spearing argument, you have to believe that a tiny smallmouth population produced a successful spawn of immense proportions after just one spearing season, and that all those 1989 smallies really were cookie-cutter 12" fish from a single year class. And they obviously didn't harvest every adult smallmouth in the lake that year, because they're still here. So even if they took 50% of them, you're talking about something like 10,000 adult smallmouth surviving from a single hatch. That's highly improbable, primarily because spearing didn't have any effect on the young walleyes that would feed heavily on fish the size of juvenile smallmouth. I think the size of the smallmouth hatch or hatches that began surviving in the mid-80s is clear evidence that the adult smallmouth population was already quite a bit larger than it had been in 1975, meaning natural reproduction had begun to improve significantly at least 4-5 years earlier.