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Walleye survey on Lake Norfork

1K views 3 replies 2 participants last post by  fisherman505 
#1 ·
You might find this interesting. I used to go on yearly Walleye Surveys with the G&F. We would spend about three hours at night on the lake during the walleye spawn in March/April to collect fish which were measured, sexed, and a scale taken to determine age. A couple of times, we were also trying to recover fish that had magnetic tags implanted in them from a previous year. Might add we never did find any tags.

Anyway, the way it worked was that you ran a shoreline and electroshocked for about 20 minutes. All fish were scooped up in nets and the amount of fish you caught every 20 minutes were worked against some kind of magic formula to figure out the number of walleye in a given area. Not sure how correct it was but I do know it at least gave you a baseline from year to year to see if the population in a given location was getting bigger or smaller.

When the 20 minutes were up, we would pull the boat to the shoreline and do the survey on the fish caught to determine if they were boys or girls (mostly caught boys), how long they were, and take a scale to figure out their age. Female walleye were hard to come by because they stayed in deep water out of reach of the electroshock radiation area.
In the years that I was involved with this, I never seen a walleye die from being electroshocked. They were just stunned and after the 20 minute trip, they were ready to go back into the lake. We also stunned bass, carp, crappie, stripers, hybrids and whites but since we were only after the walleye, we just left them to recover and maybe become a little smarter.

Click on: http://picasaweb.google.com/rac55ster/FishGame?authkey=pLXFgdtNR94 and you'll see a few pictures of the operation. I am new at using Picasa but I think I did it right. Will click on the URL myself to make sure it works.


Cheers.....
 
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#4 ·
I never understood why the guys don't get shocked in a metal boat??:head:
It can get tricky. There are metal rails around the boat and you can touch or hold on to them without any problem at all. But if you touch the boat and put the other hand in the water, you are in trouble.

The dipnets you use are about 15 feet long and the handles are made of wood or fiberglass so that's not a problem. But just in case, when the generator is pumping amps into the water, it is be controlled by a foot-switch-peddle which is let up on every time someone nets a fish. This is because as you bring the pole up, it gets wet and if the end of the net is still in the water, you are in for a shock. I don't ever remember anybody getting kicked on their butt though. That genny is kicking out something like 5 amps which will really light your fire.

We were up a small feeder creek one night and this beaver came chugging down the creek. Everything was fine until he got into the electrical field. I never thought a beaver could walk on water but this little guy did the best he could and flew up the bank and we never saw him again.

Cheers.....
 
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