Scuba Steve with a pretty good crappie.
James Soltysiac with a nice walleye caught on the Bink's Spoon.
The lake level is 553.62 and has raised 1/2 inch in the last 24-hours. They quit generating all night and have just started up one generator. They are trying to hold up the lake as high as possible for as long as possible. It needs to drop 5-1/2 feet before spring but they just refuse to do so. The surface water temperature continues to stay at just above 60 and has for several days. It will drop with the cold weather moving in Monday. That will not hurt anything. It has to get just below 40-degrees for any meaningfull shad kill. A shad kill is very good for fishing but I prefer not to have one. The more bait fish the better as far as I am concerned. It was a beautiful day and the crappie started biting again. They never stopped but slowed a bit. Blackburns has several good fishermen in now and we will see what happens today. Some nice ones were caught yesterday and all of them were on Blackburns Brush piles. We like that. That is why we work so hard to put them in for you. They are at good levels and are producing fish. The game and fish replentishing the old existing brush that the corps had neglected really helped reduce the pressure on ours and helped the fishing. Crappie, bluegill and bass fishing were the best yesterday with a couple of very nice walleye also being caught. Some small white bass are also showing up but as for the rest of the temperate bass goes the hybrid fishing is best. Except for this year about four times as many stripers are stocked than hybrids but the hybrids take to the low oxygen in the late summer better and do not die off as bad. Neither one reproduces in fresh water lakes and are considered semi-put and take. If they would keep the lake below 560, continue to stock the numbers of stripers as in the past the population should come back from the low numbers. It will take a while as people continue to kill the small ones below 10-pounds and seem proud to do it. Some people just want them gone anyway. I do not and do not think they hurt the other fish population as long as the shad count remains high. They are fun to catch but do not dress out very well. The lake overall is in excellent condition and is at a perfect depth and clarity for fishing. We will see what the winter brings. Just keep the ice storms away.
