In ten years.......

[merc]

Most people dream of finding a lake way back in the boonies that no one fishes and they will just hammer huge fish. Not the case!! A couple of years ago I worked my butt off to get to a little lake like that. It was absolutely non stop action, sunfish and crappies so fast you couldn't get your line down to the bottom and all of them were the size of silver dollars. Never got one fish even close to keeping size. If everyone did c & r all of the time a lot of lakes would end up like this. I'm not saying everyone should keep a limit everytime out but keeping a meal now and then can be beneficial to most lakes. I do a lot of c & r but also enjoy a fresh meal of fish. Walleyes are a different scenario but panfish will overpopulate if left untouched. Good luck to everyone and stay warm!!!

[MikeYager - Suzuki]

Seems to me ice fishing can have the greatest impact. For example over the years I've seen lakes come along with a great year class of big bluegills. Once the word gets out herds of ice fisherman camp over the best spots and fish them to death. Usually a season or two is all it takes on a small lake. The quality bluegill fishing is then gone on that lake for some time. That's the one example I have seen first hand many times.

[iland99]

Merc, as I was reading this thread I was going to post an experience exactly like yours. This weekend a buddy and I carried our gear over a mile through the woods to a lake I didn't even know existed until looking at some DNR maps. We thought we were gonna nail some pound-plus crappies. Well, we did get a bunch of crappies, but they were about 10 to a pound. You could practically see through the poor things. Had a big northern break us off 3 times. I bet there aren't many pike in that lake but I bet the few that are in there are HUGE with all those dinky crappies to eat!!

[Animal]

I believe that we will slowly adjust our fishing regulations to accout for new technology and equipment. Anyone who has fished LOW, Rainy and Kabetogama-Namakan knows that fishing has dramatically improved over the last seveal years because of management. I think that eventually we will see some of the same management techniques applied to the smaller lakes.

I need to note that fishing is impacted more by shoreline development than fishing pressure.

[merc]

Hey hollywood pete, like a friend of mine used to say "they were so small you could hold them up to the light and read a newspaper through them". That's small and that's about the size we got that day.