bfishn

Congrats! Given the weather when you were there, you certainly earned EVERY one! I used to do that, but the zippers on my snow suit are defective now... they only go part way up... :-) My buddy & I went Sunday 5-10PM. Hit all of our spots twice, nary a bite. We pulled the plug out of boredom. My calendar says it's getting late now (your timing was juussst right), but the thermometer, low water, and lack of flow may override/extend that. As we passed under the 'gate', I marveled at how high in the air it seemed, remembering my last "good" year, when I had to remove the grab bar on my windsheild just to squeeze under to get back to the ramp. Good times!

If I recall my Genesis correctly, we were given "dominion over the fish of the sea"... Whether righteously endowed or not, we've driven some species to extinction, and keep others in our homes for fun. Some live well off our crops and some are driven out by our cities. I don't think there's a critter on the planet that we haven't influenced to a significant degree. My take on it's real simple, based on a couple things Dad said regularly; At night, "Critters belong outside". In the morning, "Time to feed the cows".

Flying Fish Seafood, across from the old Harps, a block off the Bentonville square. Huge menu, great food, very reasonable prices, and a fisherman's decor.

And while us have-a-littles argue the fate of the have-nothings, the have-a-lots are taking it to the bank. 210 new billionaires in the last 12 months (Forbes). Personally, I'd rather help a dozen people that need it than one that doesn't.

They stock Lake Atlanta (just up the road, drains into PC) with winter rainbows, 1250 went in about 3 weeks ago. Better shore access and nothing to eat them there except us hoomans (and great blue herons). Probably a much better ROI than PC would allow.

(Chuckle) Yeah, I'm becoming more warm-blooded with each passing year. At 35, I used to draw the line at an all-nighter at a 25 degree forecast (with a little propane heater at my feet). That number has risen about a degree every year or two since. My nose & toes just don't handle the frost like they used to. Gar was my suspect. Weird thing was I witnessed it for several years in a row, always in the same area, always just at dawn,(and always just out of casting distance). I know a couple of narrow shallow rubble shelfs (one an old roadbed) that I've found 'em more than once, but I think I've caught more numbers randomly suspended there over the years. Thank you!

I didn't mean to sound so absolute, sorry. Monsters can certainly be made at less than optimum temps, it just takes a lot longer. I do think there's a minimum temp for significant growth in all species. I base this mainly on when I tried to feed out some 10" channel cat in a trout pen once. That was over 20 degrees below optimum. Kept them almost a year and gave them all they'd eat. They were very healthy, but only gained about 10% in weight, with a terrible feed conversion ratio. A couple of fish frys ended that mess. :-) There's also a minimum food rate for growth, even at optimum temps. I could keep trout healthy and exactly the same size for as long as I wanted on "maintenance" food levels. This was counter to the more profitable growth regime, but I had to keep some 10 inchers year round for restaraunt customers, and I only hatched once a year. Added Know what you mean about those annoying little bass. Too bad we can't use them for bait... :-)

Then you've likely encoutered those huuuge topwater swirls in and around the timber patch just down from the HI bend right at dawn this time of year... what the h*** are those?

Good question. Like all cold-blooded critters, body temperature sets the metabolic rate, of which digestion is certainly a function. A meal that could be digested in a day in summer can take three in winter. You see lots of smatter about "preferred" temperatures, but that's a poor choice of words. Rather, each species has an "optimum" temperature for egg development, another for spawning, and yet another for maximum growth rate. For walleye, maximum growth occurs at 72 degrees (a fact that I intentionally turned a blind eye to in my attempt to raise them in 58 degree trout water). Northern 'eyes grow slow, but live longer. Walleye in food-abundant reservoirs at this latitude grow fast, live hard, and die young. Those 20lbers didn't get to be 20lbs by spending their lives in the cold depths. Not to say they don't go there at times, they obviously do. They just don't grow bigger there. I knew a bowfisherman that said he saw lots of big 'eyes in the twilight summer shallows when he was out pokin' holes in carp on Bull. Biologists routinely report monsters in summertime electrofishing surveys, and shocking is a shallow water method too. It's pretty hard to turn away from a predictable summer bite on ~28' flats on crawler rigs and move to open water to follow the shad, but that's where my money says I'll find that one fish I'm after.

You're welcome. True that. I had a regular stream of live trout customers drive up from the Hot Springs area, loading their shad tanks with 8-10 inchers. It wasn't a year round business, but peaked about the same time the AGFC announced trout releases from their net pens in Quachita. Hmmmm.... I occasionally heard "striper candy" and "magic bait" muttered between driver and passenger. When I queried one fellow about walleye, he noted that 'they knew when they had drifted beyond the edges of a striper school when they picked up a walleye'. I imagine the only effect the switch to 12 inchers had on the stripers, walleye, and cats was those under ~10 lbs were stuck eating shad. (The difference in form factor and bulk between 10 & 12" is pretty big). Even though I had plenty of opportunity, I never experimented personally with my trout on game fish in public waters... it was my livliehood at stake after all. I have had some luck with trout pattern sticks on TR walleye though. Added I also had some fellows from Gore, OK. that liked to use trout for walleye and stripers in the Tenkiller tailwater. Not only was that legal there, you could even catch (your limit of) trout on rod-n-reel, then move a bit downstream and use your catch for bait. Very unpretentious folks over there. Think about it... if you take 1 tailwater striper or walleye with 1 trout, you just saved all the trout that fish would have eaten in the future for someone else to catch...

Thanks! My one-finger hunt-n-peckin' usually keeps me from getting that windy. Food-sized walleye was the goal. I had a large captive concentration of transplanted Yankee (no offense intended) customers with money to spend and a cultured taste for 'eyes. I also did some catering for their clubs (fish fries, pig roasts, etc) and could have used the 'eyes to great advantage. Edit I eventually had a few hundred fry that got big enough to eat trout fry, (which they did with great relish when I let them). I could have fed them out on a trout diet easily, but when I put a pencil to it, the final product would have cost more than the market would bear.

You're welcome rps, and thanks for your info too. I've lurked here for awhile, and spent a lot of time on your home stretch, so I always look for your contributions. Hoping to get over that way soon for a ritualistic fling at it. Going on 25 years now...

Greetings fellow 'eye fans! Newbie here. I'd like to add some personal experience to this very interesting thread. In the '90s I revived and ran an old spring-fed trout hatchery. What I lacked in formal training I made up for in enthusiasm for everything fish (and books from the University library). Once I had the trout production operating well, I decided to try to raise walleye too. The facility was a flow-thru 58 degree raceway setup. This precluded the ability to use plankton ponds like the state boys do, so I had to try to get the fry on "store-bought" feed like my trout were. This was something that there was almost no industry success at, and absolutely no literature on. I solicited the advice of a very cooperative USF&W fellow from the Bozeman, Mt. facility who was trying to do the same thing. I arranged to buy 70,000 walleye fry from another hatchery, and when I met the truck at midnight at the 65/412 junction, some of the fry were still hatching. Walleye fry are... very tiny... new hatches are about 3/16" long and skinny as all getout. Within 3 days they've used up the yolk sac (the only free lunch they'll ever get) making them even smaller. They're programmed to begin eating live food at day 4, and the only thing fitting that description in a size they can ingest is zooplankton. Feed particles for trout fry (powder actually) were too big for the walleye, so I had purchased some very expensive developemental feed suggested by my F&W buddy that was screened to the appropriate micron partical size for walleye. Only a small percentage of my fry would eat it though, given the previously mentioned penchant for live feed. They soon found that live feed source though... each other. By day 7, I was seeing large numbers of fry with a sibling in their mouth (hard to swallow someone your own size). A day later, the uneaten portion having fallen away, they swallowed and digested the rest. It didn't take many days of this before the cannibals were noticeably larger than the fry that took my feed, so you can guess the fate of my "farmable" fish. By week 4, I was down to approx. 5,000 1/2" fry, all cannibals that wanted nothing to do with my feed. Even my F&W buddy with much greater resources fared little better than I at the fry stage, though he eventually had some limited success getting much larger fingerlings on the feedbag. The AG&FC Centerton hatchery prepares plankton ponds long in advance by calculated fertilization with hay and prepared fertilizers. The ponds must reach a certain density of zooplankton by the 4 day post hatch date which is a serious challenge given the weather at that time. Raise a jar of that screened pondwater to the light and you can see millions of tiny little critters twitching about (and there's even more you can't see). It's a critical timing game as a few cloudy cold days can wipe out a zooplankton crop. The point of this ramble is to shed a little light on natural walleye recruitment, in particular for the WR chain. The old pre-impoundment White River had a distinct seasonal temperature/nutrient profile that apparently supported the critically timed zooplankton bloom needed for walleye fry survival. Those conditions almost never exist in today's tailraces, or for that matter, many miles downlake, primarily because the waters don't warm soon enough to support a decent zooplankton bloom. Adult fish can go a month or more with little to no food, but the tiny fry go belly up in a couple days, and they don't have the option of swimming a long ways to find it. Nobody told the spawners that they're largely wasting their time spawning in the tailraces though (or maybe they don't care) so large numbers head for the biggest party in town every year. The remaining free-flowing rivers that feed the WR chain can support some natural recruitment, but it's a numbers game (small river, big lake). Stocking supplemental fingerlings at a time when there's plenty of appropriately-sized live food to thrive on gives the best bang for the buck, and even that method is subject to many variables. (I hope that's not too windy or off topic)