I spent only one day fishing Lake Winnipeg this winter and have gotten my fix of the big lake vicariously through the experiences of others.
If there's a common theme, it's the scarcity of larger walleyes, the giant "greenbacks" that have drawn anglers to Lake Winnipeg by the thousands in recent years.
Catching walleyes this winter on Lake Winnipeg hasn't been a problem most days, from what I've been told, but those big "Master Angler"-size walleyes measuring 28 inches or longer have been conspicuous by their absence.
That was our experience in early January, as well. Three of us easily landed 40 walleyes, but only a couple of those fish measured longer than 20 inches.
Most were of the "cookie-cutter" 16- to 18-inch variety. Nice walleyes, to be sure, but nothing we'd brag to our friends about.
Contrast that to the January afternoon three years ago, when two of us landed seven greenbacks in the 28-inch range and lost at least that many others at the hole.
I may have lost a few big walleyes that day, but at least I had the opportunity to hook them.
So what's going on?
Long story short, you can't catch what's not there. The big walleyes, almost all of them from a massive hatch in 2001, are disappearing, experts say, driven by a commercial fishing industry that operates on a provincial multispecies quota system that allows the netters to harvest more than 14 million pounds _ that's not a misprint _ annually of any combination of walleyes, saugers and whitefish.
