Gill-T

Very unusually marked Brown.

Pin your cheater with a rubberband at a set location and your hookup ratio will improve. Thanks for your report.

Personally, I am not concerned about the bloaters. Either they will make it or they won't. In nature a diversified ecosystem with more players is always a healthier system. A variety of baitfish is good. Over the years we have lost some diversity with decreases in Emerald Shiner, Sticklebacks, Spot-tailed shiners and Smelt populations on Ontario so bring on more bloaters. The lake is o'changing. On Erie we are seeing huge increases in smelt, perch and gizzard shad....and now invasive Rudd. Nobody can foresee the future completely, however, the population of the GTA is only going to get bigger which means more organic stuff dumping into the lake from all the Canadian bacon they eat. More nutrients means more baitfish so you need more apex predators to balance things out.

Those preyfish reports are already outdated with the recent changes to the food web dynamics on Lake Ontario. The LOLA report from Lake Ontario shows the zooplankton community is changing almost year to year. What we knew four years ago is already obsolete. Bloaters will probably find todays environment suitable as there is plenty of food in the deeper layers of the DCL. My only concern is during the winter when alewives have to drop down 200' to find food they will be in direct competition with the bloaters. My guess is many of the dying alewives we are seeing are not the result of severe temp changes but more likely shows that the stress of a long winter has put them in poor shape (they were starving) and they are having trouble handling the rigors of the spawn. We need some warmer temps to jump start the spring food web season. If my theory that alewives are in fact starving, it shows that there are not enough apex predators to keep the bait levels inline with available food over the winter stretch. This goes back to the original premise of this thread.......we need more Kings at a time when Canada is trying to get out of the game.

DNRoch, I assume from your handle you might be a biologist? If so, maybe you could identify yourself? It would be really beneficial to have a dialogue on this forum with a biologist working on the Great Lakes project.

You don't need anything special to kill a Turkey. Hell I have always used just a "Duck and Pheasant" load in 2 3/4".

Yodamage, with all due respect how is it going to make sense economically? The return in investment on the Pacific species pays for itself many times over in economic stimulus.

I bought my boat because of the Pacific species in Lake Ontario. Without them.....I would sell it. My guess is you would lose 3/4 of the charter business as well. Atlantics are never going to make it and Lake Trout in Lake Ontario are not fit for human consumption. I would love to pick the brain of some of our biologists to find out just what their vision of the future looks like.

If you are following what is going on Spoonpullers.com......some scary crap about to go down with the Canadians potentially getting out of the Pacific game. Oops Brian you beat me to it by a couple of seconds

The ones you have are they used or new?

Luckily we had enjoyed unusually warm summers most of this decade to "fill the food-web" prior to this cold winter. At the same time we have had warm fall temps with low rainfall. To count on natural reproduction numbers with poor spawning conditions is a little crazy. Everyone can agree that the bait is going to be in the west end of the lake this time of year so it may give a false sense on how much bait is out there lakewide. However, everything is relative. If Capt. Vince says there is more bait on the west end then he has seen in a long time....then take his word for it as he is on the water more than anyone. Where is the Koho research vessel now? To get an accurate picture of bait numbers lakewide (assuming all the bait is west of Rochester), would it be easiest to take bait level reading right now on the west end of the lake? Perhaps what is needed is a less stringent hard cap number on the amount of Kings stocked year-to-year. More active management. Warm years with good production......put more kings in to control bait numbers. After cold hard back-to-back winters.....stock less.

Billy, how have these mounts performed for you? Was thinking about upgrading to these from my older lexan swivel bases.