To add some more information, to my knowledge the lake is about 120 years old. To add what I know about the fish population, I have identified LMB, pike, yellow perch(many of them but very stunted) mostly smaller bluegill, small numbers of very large crappie, common carp, redhorse suckers. I'm not sure what most of the forage fish are, I have caught shiners in the past but I can't say there's a huge population. Good news is zero catfish or bullheads(knock on wood)
In terms of pike management, I would love to catch less of them, just larger. Used to be very large pike in the lake. We used to catch a handful of 40+ inches every year, haven't caught one that size in at least 10 years. My largest bass was 7.5lbs almost 20 years ago. In the last year I've caught 3 pushing 5lbs, and all of them were underperforming weight wise. What's interesting is there's not a lot of in between, the mainly 1-2lb fish and those 5lbers.
This year I cut down about a dozen cedars and dragged them on the ice, I've noticed a couple of them have been a magnet for small pan fish already, I plan on expanding that along with creating my own fish structures.
I would love to have an electroshocking survey done, problem is I can't seem to locate someone in michigan who does it so i could even figure out a cost. It's very interesting that michigan doesn't seem to have much of a pond management culture, even though our state is chock full of fisherman
