Hello everyone, longtime lurker on this forum, first time poster. My family has had property in Michigan's northern lower peninsula for almost 25 years. A 50 acre lake sits in the center of the property, never been stocked (as long as it's been in our hands) Lake is crescent shaped, with a number of bays and points and steep drops offs around the entirety of the lake, the deepest spot is 27 feet, with an average 18 foot channel going through the center of the lake. My main focus in this lake are the largemouth bass. The lake also has a good number of northern pike.
Over the last 10 years or so I've noticed the catch rates are very high, with the numbers of trophy bass going way down. We've operated almost strictly catch and release as we mistakenly thought that was the only way to go to maintain big bass. I've started keeping track of weights over the last year and most of our bass are in the 80-90 percent relative weight range. I've heard advice saying keep everything under 14 inches, but looking at my charts, that would probably be an insignificant portion of the harvest, as the vast majority of the fish I catch are in the 16-17 inch range.
I'm trying to devise a management plan and my main focus is trophy bass, am I better off just taking everything that is under relative weight even in that 17 inch range? I'm also open to any other suggestions as to how to move forward, thank you.
