Hello all. It's been a few years since my last post, but Ontario Smallies and I just returned from little fishing trip to the lake, and wanted to give interested parties an update.
The LMB seem to have done very well. It was a two day trip, and I personally caught about 10+ fish like the one in the attached photo, and spent much of one day guiding, so apparently the LMB like what the lake has to offer.
We do, however, have some concerns. We caught a lot of LMB, and not so many SMB. Caveats to this were that we (especially I) really fished more in LMB water (lilly pads, soft bottom with a tree fall or something, etc.) than we did in SMB waters (rocky bottom, rock faces, etc.) That said, these were waters that had historically held substantial populations of SMB, so it was unexpected that we saw so few SMB over the weekend.
We're both probably excessive worriers, but just wanted to bounce this off an expert or two: 1) Is it too early in the year, or the wrong time of year (near the spawn) to make judgements about bass populations? 2) Considering we added the LMB about 5 years ago, how long would you say it will be before a lake this size reaches a new equalibrium? 3) Are we worrying too much about it?
We didn't measure the water temp, so it's entirely possible that we caught the two species on either side of their respective spawns. Bass season isn't officially open on public waters until 4th Sat of June, and I've never been up there this early in the year, so I really don't know how to gauge what happens when. There were plenty of beds, but I'm not sure I can say that fish were actively patroling them (SMB certainly weren't).
YP populations seemed to be just fine, and PS populations were probably okay (I saw them, but didn't present baits that they'd be able to fit in their mouths).
We'll be returning mid to late summer, and will give another update then.
