LSC

[mikballa]

Hi everyone heard some good info from kvd today he said he don't know what happened but fish are skinny, him and jvd could not fish much baitfish in st.Clair this trip, also talked with Joe balog he said he was out the week before same info as kvd,also he said he herd that DNR took some fish out of Clair for testing also other reports coming in stay small and few. Thanks.

[djkimmel]

Well, you heard part of the story. There IS plenty of bait in Lake St. Clair this year. The only thing that has thinned out quite a bit are the gobies but that has been ongoing for several years now. Not sure exactly what is going on but I talked to Joe about it, Kevin about it, and quite a few other people about it, before and after I talked to the MDNR. Gene Gilliland was involved in some discussion and was involved with the MDNR when they were choosing a selection of 'fat' bass and 'skinny' bass from the tournament to test. Gene will be a great resource in the future since he is retiring from his Oklahoma Fisheries Division job 12/31/2013 and stepping in as B.A.S.S. Conservation Director immediately after! I can't think of a better person in the U.S. with more bass biology and bass tournament - biology knowledge than Gene. He was kind enough to talk to me for some time Saturday and Sunday about a number of things.

I have posted some elsewhere already. I will post more later this week, and as any additional useful information comes forward I will share that too.

The short version is - there is no new or mystery disease known on Lake St. Clair. There is no evidence of any smallmouth bass die off and not for a lack of the MDNR looking either. They had been out all day the day I talked to them, and they showed up at the Elite Series weigh in to look at the bass.

The MDNR is seeing plenty of healthy, well-fed smallmouth bass on Lake St. Clair visually, on camera and physically. In fact, in their last all day lake check they saw no dead bass - visibility was excellent - and found only 1 sickly bass in the mouth of the Clinton River.

Other anglers in other parts of Lake St. Clair are reporting that most of the bass they catch are fat and spitting up lots of minnows, though some of those anglers reports they don't feel like they are catching as many real big bass.

The movement of numbers of smallmouth bass into the channels was much smaller this year and though one can't say for sure 100% why, it does coincide approximately with the drop in water temps suddenly when we had the cold spell after the real hot weather. We have had some arguably crazier than average weather the past several seasons, and we have constantly changing positioning and behavior in the smallmouth bass during different seasons and/or parts of the lake. I would not be surprised if there is some connection.

Understand that when the pros last practiced and set their expected patterns on Lake St. Clair we were coming off that real late spring into real hot weather. Everything was on high volume trying to squeeze several months into less than two. Even the mayflies were confused since we had a slightly late, shorter hatch and then a small, much later second hatch that may have confused just about everybody and everything.

The lake goes off limits including information from any local anglers or from the lake. It gets suddenly as cold as the low 50's and stays cooler for a while. No big movement of bass up the river. Bass at the Hump move out (many anglers were planning on the Hump I'm told) and then there's a mix of fat bass in some areas and skinny bass that don't seem to be feeding well in other areas even though many anglers and minnow trappers report that big minnow schools are roaming the open lake AND moving up the channels. And that some of these anglers are catching large numbers of bass where they don't normally catch large numbers this time of year, and the bass are spitting up lots of minnows.

The pros come back with 2 1/2 practice days to find out they are on a 'new' lake and they have to practically start over from scratch. Some tried to cover all 3 lakes! Many tried to cover at least both St. Clair and Erie. Some fairly predictable fishing patterns emerged out of this chaos and confusion. Despite the confusion and many, many theories including some that seem crazy to me, the pros in general demonstrated why they are fishing full-time while we read and talk about it.

The primary forage right now is a number of different kinds of schooling minnows (as it was before the gobies invaded), a bumper crop of young of the year perch this year, along with pretty good numbers of young of the year smallmouth and largemouth bass (yes, cannibals - this is not uncommon), some areas of the lake report they feel they are seeing heavier than average crayfish predation.

Goby numbers on Lake St. Clair have been shrinking for several years and they may not go back up. Don't expect anything done about this because they are an invasive species and besides, the primary reason the goby numbers are shrinking appears to be because their primary forage base is gone - Zebra mussels. Quagga mussels appeared in Lake St. Clair a number of years ago and have pretty much eradicated the Zebra mussels. Quagga mussels grow larger and do not carpet things in the same way the Zebra mussels did so the gobies don't have the abundant, easy, readily available food source everywhere they once had. Take away a predator's food source in this way, and the predators number will often go down.

I don't expect a Quagga mussel eradication, Zebra mussel planting program to come along since they are all invasive species that cause problems too.

My personal working theory based solely on what I have been told so far by good sources is that the bass that should have run up the channels following known food sources stayed in the lake instead and have not adjusted their feeding behavior yet to replacement sources to continue to feed well. Considering there is no evidence of large numbers of dead bass or a 'new' disease, and that there are bass feeding well in some areas on plentiful bait, I expect this is another blip in the constantly changing world of smallmouth bass populations on one of the fastest changing lakes in the U.S. that also happens to be one of the more productive.

I also realize that much of the reaction from anglers to these kinds of things comes from a great caring and desire to keep a great thing great. I understand that, and it was magnified by coinciding with a high profile event that pitted anglers unknowing of any change added to the additional fear that all the extra attention this year to 'our' lake is 'too much!'

We can't really look at a lake this big in such short terms. It is like betting your whole life savings in one company on the stock market during a particularly hot week. The MDNR is looking into it to see if there is a problem or if this is just another change among many changes caused by many factors. It will take some time. Things may have changed even more by then.  It is more likely something not in our control.

In fact, we can probably count on it. Especially under these changing water level and weather conditions the past few years, on a lake as big as St. Clair that can exchange water so fast with such diverse fisheries. My outlook will remain positive considering that Lake St. Clair smallmouth bass have generally been improving since the early 1990's without a long-lasting significant drop in all that time, and that the improvement did not only come with the gobies but with cleaner, clearer water, possibly the increase to the 14 inch size limit and an increase in the practice of voluntary catch-and-release of a significant percentage of bass caught. All of those factors continue on except the gobies.

Past performance might not be a reliable indicator in certain stocks but over the long haul betting the whole market pays off. Lake St. Clair smallmouth bass have been like that a long time now and so far there is no indication that we will see a long term reversal in that trend based on known factors versus short term blips that will happen with smallmouth bass populations usually due to factors out of our control.

Lake St. Clair is probably the most consistently sampled and watched over lake in Michigan so if something new comes into play, odds are pretty good either the MDNR, other agencies and/or the anglers will notice it, and it will get identified if it is a factor that can be identified like a disease.

I said this would be short, and this is about as short as I can make a discussion about an entire population on a lake this big and complex summarizing everything involved and/or known so far. As Gene Gilliland told me earlier Sunday, in general, decades of study by the states who have stuck to looking at the Great Lakes long term have shown that Mother Nature pretty much always ends up being the primary factor that has the most impact on fisheries season to season, and so far, we can't do much about Mother Nature. But we can talk a lot about fishing pressure, fishing regulations, fishing restrictions, invasive species, bass tournaments, etc, etc.

While you are talking about these things, please remember three things - 1) Lake St. Clair is a big, productive, incredibly resilient lake, particularly if we continue to be interested in limiting our pollution and other manmade issues we actually can control; 2) Before the Clean Water Act, Zebra mussels (now Quagga mussels) and other factors cleared and cleaned up the water Lake St. Clair was a big, productive lake dominated by largemouth bass instead of smallmouth bass; 3) If I could I would be out there tomorrow in a heartbeat chasing after all those long, 'skinny' bass over just about any other fishing I can think of!