Friday, March 27, 2009
Watching over walleyes
Tagging program part of strategy for increasing angler interest in the species
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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BASSETT -- Finicky and shy, walleyes often require a careful approach from anglers.
But as he maneuvered his large johnboat along the shore of Philpott Reservoir on Monday night, Dan Wilson was hardly taking a subtle approach.
From the front of his boat extended two aluminum booms, dangling from them like the fiery tentacles of an octopus cables sending an electrical current into the water.
As the boat moved steadily along, fish stunned by the current twitched to the surface. Helpers Woody McCain and Mark Frank scooped them up and deposited them in a livewell.
The take in less than two hours?
Fifty-seven walleyes.
While this fishing method isn't exactly sporting, it's all about improving recreational fishing opportunities.
A district fisheries biologist with the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, Wilson was collecting walleyes as part of an ongoing tagging project at Philpott and several other waters around the state.
Enormously popular in the upper Midwest, walleyes have only recently attracted this kind of focus in Virginia.
Until about 10 years ago the game department stocked walleyes in many waters.
"We had a few walleyes everywhere, but not a good population anywhere," said Wilson, whose responsibilities include Smith Mountain and Leesville lakes. "We were stocking like a million fish a year and we didn't have a single [good] fishery.
"We weren't getting much out of it."
So the game department shifted its approach and pared down the list to systems with the most potential.
That meant lakes such as Philpott and Hungry Mother would get more fish, while places such as Smith Mountain Lake, which would require an annual stocking of the state's entire allocation of walleyes to create a decent fishery, were removed from the program.
"And we started really seeing an improvement," Wilson said.
Philpott, a deep reservoir covering about 2,900 acres in Patrick and Henry counties, is among the waters where walleye fishing is really catching on.
Each year the agency tries to stock 144,000 fingerling walleyes in Philpott, where natural reproduction is limited.
Creel surveys indicate that only black bass -- smallmouths and largemouths -- attract more fishing pressure than walleyes.
Granted, bass attract a whopping 71 percent of angler attention at the lake. But, at 14 percent, walleyes receive more than double the attention given species such as sunfish and catfish.
Previous tagging projects in 2002, 2003 and 2006 also have confirmed a big difference between bass anglers and walleye anglers at the lake.
While nearly all bass are released, a high percentage of walleyes end up in the frying pan.
"It's a really harvest-oriented species," Wilson said of walleyes, a member of the perch family with a reputation as fine table fare.
The tag return rate from the 2002 and 2003 studies was about 20 percent, Wilson reported. Taking into account lost tags and anglers who didn't bother returning tags -- despite the lure of cash rewards -- Wilson figures anglers caught about 30 percent of the fish that had been tagged.
The high catch and keep rate prompted the agency to install a minimum size limit of 18 inches for the lake's walleyes in 2006.
Anglers reported high catches of fish just under the limit last year, which should translate to more keepers this year.
The vast majority of the fish brought in Monday night were in the 18- to 20-inch range. Most were males, which won't get much larger. Four had previously been tagged; one in 2002, the others in 2006.
The catch included a few larger females, the heaviest maybe 4 pounds.
Wilson tagged another 120 walleyes on Wednesday night, and had a final collection trip to the lake planned for Thursday.
Although Philpott's walleyes don't attract much angling pressure early in the spring, action steadily increases as the lake's water warms.
Fishing with topwater plugs along the shoreline during the alewife spawn in May and early June is a popular tactic.
As the water warms further into summer, the walleyes move into deeper water, where fishermen target them by trolling or drifting live bait such as nightcrawlers. Harvest pressure peaks in the summer.
Whether anglers are on the water in spring, summer, fall or even winter, Wilson is just glad fishermen are focusing on Philpott's walleyes.
"I'm pretty happy with it," Wilson said of the fishery. "I don't think I could expect a whole lot more.
"I think it's fulfilled our objectives."
