It's been many years since I fished in Minnesota, so on a recent visit to the North Shore and north central part of the state I was bemused to see this sign at Leech Lake (a huge lake (>100,000 acres) with lots of muskies; according to the DNR "Muskie anglers averaged 1 fish/31 angler-hours, during the 2011 fishing season.")
But note, if you catch a musky and it's less than four feet long, you have to release it.
"...We're gonna need a bigger boat."
ReplyDeleteThere might be a valid reason for that - over here in the UK we don't have muskie but we do have Esox Lucius, known to you as Northern Pike and to us simply as Pike.
ReplyDeleteA number of 'managed' fisheries used to encourage the destruction, or at best relocation of large pike in an attempt to reduce the rate of predation on their managed stocks - carp primarily, but also bream, tench, roach, rudd, trout etc.
I'm not familiar with Muskie, but pike are cannibalistic, with the number of juvenile pike being managed naturally by the bigger fish. So, remove the bigger fish - couple of years later you have a population explosion of mature fish, grown on from the smaller fish that enjoyed a lack of natural predators for the previous couple of years.
Might be unrelated, but that's the mistake that some fisheries still make over here.
However, if the post was about the 4' size limit rather than the theory behind it my apologies, but yeah - that's a big fish...
Muskie lakes tend to have few pike -- they get eaten.
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