(Orleans)– This year’s gillnetting operations on the Iowa Great Lakes will look a little different. Mike Hawkins, Regional Fisheries Management Supervisor for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources says in past years they typically have brought in crews from outside the region to assist. He says that won’t be the case this year…
“Our netting actually has been so good over the last few years here that we’re going to be able to probably handle most of our netting just using some local crews. So we’re going to start with three boats. We’re going to actually try to slow down just a little bit, the number of fish coming in every night. We’re going to be modifying our technique a little bit. All of that will depend on how the catch goes and how the weather cooperates. Really it’s kind of a great problem to have because catching too many fish in a single night can be a big problem, and so this year we’re going to slow things down a little bit, limit the number of crews that we have out. Of course we’ll also have netting operations down at Storm Lake and then also at Lake Rathbun. We’ll be getting walleye and walleye eggs from those locations as well. Some of those eggs from Storm Lake may come here. They sometimes split and go to the Rathbun fish hatchery where they’re hatched there as well, so.”
As we reported previously, gillnetting for Northern Pike got underway earlier in the week. Hawkins tells us walleye operations are still a week to 10 days out, depending upon conditions.
